5 Alternatives to Tech Internships
Bonus section for Machine Learning Folks.
Welcome to the 10th edition of MichiSpotlight! Thank you so much to everyone who helped keep a lazy person such as myself be consistent and accountable for sharing insights through this newsletter.
In the first-ever edition of MichiSpotlight, we talked about securing internships and preparing for them. In the next three editions (including this one), we will be focussing on internships - alternatives, making the best out of them, and skilling up for them. So, buckle up because I’m gonna spill a buttload of information on you. Make sure you’re taking notes and sharing this with your friends too.
Also, if you’re too lazy to read, do check out my YouTube channel, I’ve started work on my first video, and it would be out soon!
Remember, for you to be successful, someone else doesn’t have to be unsuccessful. Please share this newsletter with your friends and support me a little, too, in doing so. xD
Alright, so let’s begin.
Why do we do internships?
Many students don’t understand why they need to do internships. Usually, the answer to this question is “Because everyone else is doing it too,” “Our college requires us to do internships,” or “It will look good on my resume when I apply for jobs”. While these might be good enough reasons, here’s a tweet that might shed some light. I’ll continually share this tweet in the next two editions so that these reasons are deeply instilled in your mind.
If you understand the why, you’re already ten steps ahead of your peers. (Although, I’d suggest you spread the word about this among your collegemates too, don’t be knowledge greedy xD).
#1: Participate in a LOT of hackathons
Why?
You’ll work as a part of a small, diverse team made up of frontend & backend developers and designers. This is kind of like your own mini-dev team.
Due to the pandemic, you’d have to collaborate with them in a remote environment. Getting everyone together on the same platform, brainstorming, and building together is not an easy job, but the experience will equip you with valuable insights.
When you participate in many hackathons, you meet with different people, network with them, and become a part of different teams. You have the flexibility to choose what role you want to play in the team and explore your interests by doing so.
If you’re more into the business side of things, you can participate in business teardowns organized by different product communities.
Sometimes companies hire interns by organizing hackathons. This can be useful if you’re still looking to find paid internships.
TLDR; You’re able to collaborate, network, get valuable experience, and build new projects every time you participate in a hackathon.
Not able to discover hackathons?
Check these websites out if you want to participate in Hackathons:
The 2021 Major League Hacking Season Hackathons here >>
Check out Devfolio: Your one application to the best hackathons >>
Devpost, where you post your hackathon submissions >>
#2: Build your own Startup
Probably the best way to avoid internships or jobs altogether is to make your own opportunities. Now, I’m not asking you to build a unicorn startup (I mean, it may end up becoming that xD), but try to solve a problem using the technology at your disposal.
Come up with a decent idea for a startup uniquely solving a problem using the technology at your disposal. If possible, align this idea with the industry that you’re interested in.
It could be something that won you the first prize at a hackathon.
Look for startup accelerators in your college or outside that support students.
In the beginning, you can collaborate on this with your friends or close acquaintances (maybe someone you met at a hackathon).
While building a startup, your learning curve will go crazy steep. You’d learn about the different domains involved like management, marketing, finance, development and design. This would be an excellent opportunity to determine the domain of your interest or whether you want to be a generalist or a specialist.
You’ll meet different people while onboarding new members on your team.
Also, if you want to learn more about startups, do join Twitter. It’s the best way to get connected with people who have similar interests.
#3: Maintain an open-source project
Let’s say you’re not into investing too much time in building a team and a startup. But you do have a great idea, and you want to build it out because it can prove useful to other people. So, you can build your own open-source project.
Once you’ve built a basic prototype or an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and put it on GitHub or any other platform, post about it on social media, make a nice poster, populate the README.md with important guidelines, add commit linters to your project, set up contribution guidelines wiki, a Pull Request template, and a proper style guide to maintain consistency. Read up on this blog to learn more.
Personally collaborate with people who are active open-source contributors, participate in open-source programs as an organization.
Plan out the trajectory of the project, schedule weekly calls with your community and active contributors.
TLDR; You learn how to plan and promote your work, collaborate and network with amazing developers from across the globe and build a full-fledged project that you can talk about in your resume.
#4: Contributing to open source
If you’re an even lazier person and don’t want to spend much time on one single project, you can start contributing to other open-source projects maintained by other people. Once you have a lot of experience in contributing, perhaps you’d want to revisit the previous alternative.
Be active in the community, ask your questions regularly, and take the feedback seriously.
Network with other contributors and participate in any weekly calls the organization might have for the project.
Additionally, go through the replies of this tweet to get started with open-source. Many seasoned contributors shared many valuable resources and advice under this tweet.
#5: Freelancing
Freelancing helps you build real projects and earn some side money as well.
You can try this out if you want to hone your skills and earn money while you’re doing so.
Although to prepare, you’ll have to build many personal projects to have something to show for before getting hired by clients to work on projects.
There’s always a strict deadline with almost no flexibility or freedom to get creative.
If you’re more of a UI/UX Developer or designer, this could be a great option for you.
One problem with freelancing, in my opinion, is that you don’t get to experience proper brainstorming sessions and collaboration among the development team at a company. Apart from that, it is a great alternative.
Bonus section for Machine Learning Folks
If you’re more into the machine learning side of things, it isn't easy to find internships as undergraduates. You can still follow the alternatives mentioned above, but here are a few things you can try specifically for your domain.
Bonus #1: Research Internships
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are largely unexplored fields. There’s a ton of ongoing research on various sub-domains, usually at universities. You can try to bag a research internship at one of these universities.
First, look for universities that have focussed research programs on ML or AI.
Look for projects on their website, shortlist the ones you’re interested in.
Cold email the professor(s) in charge of the project and then wait for them to reply. Do this for multiple projects.
In the email, try to mention a little about yourself, your college, your area of expertise, your previous work, and most importantly, why you’re a good fit for the project.
As a brownie point, try to mention how you’d like to contribute to the projects and any ideas you might have to get better results.
Bonus #2: Kaggle + Communities
If you’re into Machine Learning, I’m sure you must’ve heard of Kaggle.
On Kaggle, you can participate in competitions. Upload your work (projects in the form of notebooks), upload any datasets that you may have collected through scraping, or participate in the discussions.
Also, be active in communities for Machine Learning folks on Telegram and Whatsapp. Usually, these groups have many opportunities in the ML field.
That’s all, folks!
Thank you so much for reading till the end. I hope you found this piece insightful. Let me know in the comments if you did or if you have some other alternatives that you may have tried or heard of.
At the end of the day, internships are for our own personal growth. This can be achieved in different ways, as we discussed above. If you’d still rather do an internship, go ahead check out: So you think you can be an intern? For tips on applying to internships. There’s going to be a lot more stuff on internships next week, so stay subscribed. Bye now! :)
Thanks alot for sharing the relevant links vaishnavi
Helpful information!! Thanks a lot.
I had a question - Are there internships in product domain? I am an aspiring Product manager. So, it will be great if you can suggest some ways.