How I used an internship to pivot my career.

How I used an internship to pivot my career. 19 April 2024
An internship at age 31, 8 months after becoming a first time mum - am I nuts?!

What I learnt? How it made me feel? What about your ‘ego’?

As young as 4 in the UK we are taught - or at least I felt I was taught. You always go forwards, you might go diagonal, sure but in life the momentum is a forwards motion. This starts in school, reception year, year 1, year 2, year 3 etc. You must always go in this linear forwards motion. I suppose there is a mini break during a gap year(if you have one), but then into university and beyond. Get a job, be a junior, work for a bit, get promoted to mid level, become senior, manage people etc etc. The motion is a forward one. But this never aligned with my core - what if I don’t want that. What if there is another way. What if you could actually start over or stop and go backwards a bit, or change direction. What would that look like in life?

I procrastinated on this point a lot. But then when my son was 8 months old I did it, I became an intern. I resigned from my role as a clinical writer at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. A sought after role that I had spent years trying to achieve, and 5 years doing. And I went back to the drawing board and I began a whole new career in the world of tech. If i’m honest I think maternity leave gave me the head space to stop and think.

I remember it well, (age 31 - with an 8 month old) I sat in a room with 5 other joiners all just out of university so likely age 22 ish fresh to the world of work, excited and buzzing. The first thing I noted was the positivity, and the excitement. And the variety of questions. And also the things people were talking about - it was great fun to be in such a diverse room. It was humbling. It was refreshing.

Here was I, i’d worked for the NHS, I’d worked for the civil service and for The Royal Pharmaceutical Society. I’d never worked in industry, and never for a tech company. The vibe was completely different. There was a barista coffee machine, all the different milks you could dream of, a free avocado mountain, free ‘naked’ fruit bars. A pool table. Bean bag chairs. Can you imagine my face - coming from a world of the NHS where you had to buy your own pens and buy your own milk - it was like a different universe.

In a tech company innovation and risk taking is celebrated. This again was revolutionary for me. I’d come from a heavily regulated world. Where every decision or change has a consequence. And every change needs multiple persons input. This world unfortunately means that innovation is difficult and changing the rules just doesn’t happen very much.

In the world of tech too - you can literally run off and learn without a curriculum. Without being told here is a set bunch of content you need to learn to achieve your diploma, now go and learn it. This whole concept of learning what I wanted to learn was an entirely new concept for me. In tech you can build stuff too at break neck speed. So I set about learning new tech and trying to build a product - bear in mind I was an intern so expectations of me were low - which actually I think was part of why I found it such a thriving environment. I didn’t have responsibilities I could play with ideas and I could learn.

Prior to the internship I’d been chatting to a friend who also had a baby - and we were discussing (this was 2019 - pre covid) ‘antivaxxers’ or as I prefer to term it ‘vaccine hesitancy’. Since having a child and taking him for vaccines I’d been thinking to myself - why would someone not get their child vaccinated. Apparently it was becoming more and more of a thing. So this new internship at Brandwatch - where the main concept was analysing vast amounts of twitter data - for brands, see what was trending, positive negative sentiment etc - mostly for food or drinks brands or clothing brand or hair make up sports teams etc. I thought can we use this tech for good - can I search on twitter for ‘antivax’ or basically anyone talking about why they might not get vaccinated. Can I take thousands of tweets and cluster them into groups to try and understand why, can we learn from this. I just didn’t buy it that is was as black and white as someone not agreeing with vaccines. I kept also reading about how sometimes it was accessibility - e.g. the vaccine appointment was at 9am on Monday morning during the school run.

Long story short - I didn’t manage to answer my question as building a clustering tool in 3 months working 15 hours a week was a moonshot - but… I did learn a huge ton about clustering sentence style data. This whole area relates to the area of natural language processing. Essentially where the computer reads in a bunch of text and stores it. The words and the sentences can be stored in such a way that they are what is called vectors. You can then do some fancy maths under the hood to identify which words are close together - implying some sort of relationship and some words are miles apart implying a lesser relationship. This can also be applied at the sentence level too. Long story short this basically means that if you had 100,000 sentences about why someone might choose not to get a vaccine you can cluster them - create groups of them and then begin to identify patterns in the data.

I realise I have deviated from the title of this article. But I guess what I learnt from this experience is that many industries face similar problems. Such as making sense of large amounts of data and spotting patterns. And this new venture into tech allowed me to begin building out my toolkit for solving some of these problems. And acquiring new tools that I never in a million years would have acquired being a pharmacist. After the internship I managed to get a job as a data analyst for a sports data company, which I did for 2 years, then as a python developer which I did for 2 years 10 months and now I am a data engineer.

My take homes were:

1. Learning does not have to be linear, it does not have to be from a formal curriculum. In fact if you are allowed to run after the content that inspires or excites you the most your ability to retain that information is crazy! I was consuming information about NLP like a thirsty marathon runner downing water. I could not get enough of machine learning podcasts, NLP tools, python NLP libraries. I was guzzling down all of this new information.

2. Senior people do not always know the most and they are not always right - tech tends to be much less hierarchical than other industries - and that is exciting. Because it moves so fast the young people - tend to have a good handle on what is the newest innovation. This was totally new to me - i’d only ever worked in extremely hierarchical environments. Where in fact I’d always got into trouble challenging more senior people and saying ‘well hang on what if that isn’t completely true’. To the point where i’d stopped challenging and just put myself back into my box.

3. I started every so slightly to understand about the concept of building for a one off vs building for multi use. I will use a separate blog to write about this - and this has taken me a while and I still am not good at it. But the concept being - making a one off bespoke homemade burger vs being macdonalds. The code I wrote was really naff - it was brittle, and I hard coded everything - because I didn’t know any other way and I was trying to build something that worked. But later I would begin to learn that that style of coding needed improvement if I wanted to ensure longevity in my code/products.