Who are you?
My name’s Kim, 22 years old, and I just graduated from the master ‘Data Science: Business and Governance’.
Where did you do an internship and how long?
I did an internship at bol.com, at the head quarters in Utrecht. I was a part of the Data Science & Advance Analytics team. More specifically: the team that was responsible for the buying block on the website. I was an intern for 4 months, 32 hours per week.
How did you end up there?
I ended up at bol.com via my own network. In 2017-2018, I did a board year at Kweek Communicatie. During that board year, we organized a company visit to bol.com together with one of the founders of Kweek Communicatie, Pim (who now works at bol.com). During the company visit, Pim jokingly said that I should contact him if I wanted to do an internship at bol.com. When I finished my other internship, I immediately contacted Pim. He arranged the first contact, which meant I was able to go on an interview quite quickly.
What kind of qualities I needed for the position as Data Science Intern? I had to be handy with programming (in Python), data cleaning, and I needed some experience in Machine Learning. Other than that, they liked my curriculum vitae, because of all my extracurricular activities.
Why did you want to do an internship?
The internship at bol.com was my second internship. My first internship was at IceMobile/BrandLoyalty, which I did to gain work experience in the field of data analysis. I did not want to follow any courses while writing my Master’s thesis, and by doing an internship at IceMobile/BrandLoyalty I could fill up a free block.
My internship at bol.com was focussed around my Master’s thesis. I chose for this internship, because I saw it as a positive thing if my thesis was connected to reality. This made me extra motivated during the process of writing my thesis. I also liked that I would get an extra supervisor and a team that could provide me with some extra feedback. Apart from that, I already experienced the company culture a little bit during the company visit of Kweek Communicatie. There were a lot of young and passionate people, which I liked a lot.
What did you do and learn at your internship?
During my internship, I spent most of my time on my Master’s thesis. It was discussed on beforehand that I would work 50/50 and write my thesis. That’s why I worked on a traffic analysis of the website. After two months, however, it turned out that it was a bit difficult to combine this with my thesis, as I had to write my thesis in just under 3 months due to tight university deadlines. Since then, I have worked hard on my thesis. After submitting my thesis, I still had two and a half weeks to work on projects. This was nice, because you really participate in a team.
During my internship, I learned to work with real big data. I got to know Google Cloud, BigQuery and GitHub. This was very valuable, since you don’t learn this at university. During my internship, I also had the opportunity to follow some training courses. For example, I had a hack training. I also experienced more than 1500 people working together on one website and partying together during the best day for bol.com in 2018: Black Friday.
Did you get study delay?
I took six months longer to complete my Master’s degree. From experience, I know that it is difficult to write a thesis at a company and do this nominally. Companies often expect 32-40 hours presence from you, which makes it very difficult to pass courses or do other side activities. Do you want to write your thesis at a company? Make sure you have an empty schedule for those months!
Did you receive a compensation?
Yes.
