today my humble plea is to those of you who are cool hey am i speaking your language yet thank
you for congregating all together because just by watching this video you must be super duper cool
you know my intros are kind of long so if you have any suggestions put them in the comments
tell me how long my interest would be five seconds one second and then go straight into
the info because i want to front load information for you guys but before we go too far my name
is andrew i'm a data scientist mentor and coach here in silicon valley that's professor meatball
he is a doctor from the university of corgell with a specialty in gradient descent
because he has a big nose today i'm going to tell you how similar i am to clement michele cascu
michelescu he is known as the founder of algo expert he is the millionaire 25 year old
youtuber who is talking a lot of information a lot of useful information that that about
the technical world and his startup something that helps people get into that technical world
very admirable he also tells the fact that he has learned software engineering in six months
and that's something that kind of fits into my aesthetics six figures in six months so
you have to start somewhere and usually where you're starting is with no programming language
that's why i wanted to talk to you today about finessing a non-technical internship
my junior year since that was the year i first started coding i couldn't be qualified
for a technical internship so therefore i had to go and get a business intelligence or business
development internship and that is the crux of a six-month journey where i went from entirely
non-technical stakeholder to the bridge between technical and the non-technical and i want to tell
you exactly how you can leverage non-technical internships as well as other experiences if
you're looking to pivot or if you're looking to be able to turn around your career in six months by
the end of this video you're going to understand the vague world of business development and other
non-technical internships and previous experiences that you can leverage and you can answer the
question like how does this affect my resume how do i build a technical portfolio and how do i
smash the heck out of that like button so that we can defeat the youtube algorithm together if
you like it and then people watch it that is just going to help all of us build a more tightly knit
community and join the discord down below to talk to me directly that's probably the fastest way
when we talk about business development we have to think about the age-old history of people who
are not quite the salespeople they're not going door-to-door and trying to hit up a lead they're
not quite the person who has to understand a brand and understand the customer from the inside out
and finally they're not the person in the back end with a specialized skill someone who can build out
the website or build out the data pipeline or build out an hr database full of people
to hire and people you don't want to hire business development lies in that intermediary step between
gopher like business gopher someone who runs around and does specific tasks that needs to
be done that no one really has a specific role for or something very specific something tantamount to
a crucial task in a company but it still doesn't really fit a definition by design so
business development first off would i suggest a business development internship
no don't do it why because it is all the vagueness of a data scientist role
something that people really can't put their finger on in terms of how technical or what
proportion of your work was actually dedicated to a specific craft to a specific specialized skill
so you have to fight that uphill battle business development is one of those experiences
that can make a resume reader auto reject your resume and that's something to consider greatly
depending on what actual skills you exhibited and what actual work you were able to do at a company
try to make a case to your employer that your skills were actually more exemplified of an
analyst or a data scientist so that's a very first tip work with your employer to try and change your
title especially if it's an internship and it's a relatively small company or perhaps they're a big
company with a relatively new internship program when it comes to a company trying to build out
their internship program they're just trying to get better interns through the door they're
trying to show proof of work that their internship program is actually something worth putting your
time into as a prospective intern how do you know if you have a case to ask your employer if you can
change your title to something more technical well let me talk about my specific situation
i was a business development intern my junior year in a medium-sized startup in shanghai china
at that point i was not yet an american citizen so therefore i could easily move back and forth and
actually travel all of china with my family but that's besides the point at that point i didn't
realize that tech internships especially fang internships can pay really well you're imagining
that you're probably getting paid 50 bucks an hour if you're a fan of trend red or chen black as he's
usually known on the internet he has recently gotten a fang internship but my internship was
unpaid well unpaid by the startup they were a y combinator startup they were incubated in
my university the university of chicago and so that's why their connection with the university
allows a specific stipend program to give me a 5 000 stipend so for the entire summer not
including my airfare not including my housing not including my food i've got five thousand dollars
to spend and that barely covered the airfare the food and the housing the startup was a website
template manager something that allows you to build your own website with ease something like
squarespace or something like squarespace i can't think of the other ones right now
when it came down to it that company probably was not the right size for a data scientist
anyway so that was a non-starter but they did want business development interns to come on and see
what they could do it was a startup it was my first internship at a startup so i was deluding
myself to thinking that i was under a technical internship it was not there was to be no scripting
there was to be no data pipeline management there was to be barely any whiteboarding or any actual
technical startup stuff so that's the second point i want you to take off of this video is that don't
delude yourself by being adjacent or analogous to a technical position a role like an analyst is not
adjacent or analogous to a data science role in most companies those two roles are almost entirely
separate and those two positions are almost never intersecting in terms of communication
for most companies same thing goes for a business development role or something similar
that kind of role will almost never intersect with a technical role a software engineer role you're
not just going to rub off and start scripting all of a sudden and learn the technical skills
you need so therefore it is actually a step back if you wanted to become more technical when i
was tasked with my business development role i got very little guidance actually and that's something
that you should expect from most internships even in software engineering internships when they're
paying you 50 bucks you know 60 80 bucks an hour just to get out some kind of training so that
they can get you loyal to the company and have a successful return offer accepted that actually
might end up still pretty unguided usually an internship at a software engineering level or a
data science level is project based you want to be able to build your own project or perhaps take the
lead from mentors and your manager and understand that your summer is a sprint a long sprint be it
but you have something to accomplish at the end of two months three months or perhaps an academic
year not so much with non-technical roles in a non-technical role you are much more likely to
have your time value of money be far less for the company's sake they were paying me nothing so they
were happy to just have me get coffee sometimes or maybe go run down the street and get a red
bean bow or to get some boba for them you know this wasn't my job you know i was happy to do it
but at the moment i could tell they had some software engineering internships
and those interns definitely weren't doing that i made an entire video about dignity and your time
value at work as well as your workplace trying to manipulate you to understanding that you know you
might be a family member and you should treat them like family but this is a mixed blessing
so the third thing i would say is if you have a vague understanding of success at your company and
they're trying to just pigeonhole you in a bunch of different miscellaneous tasks try and automate
try and build out pipelines as much as you can so that an excel macro that you're supposed to write
actually becomes a python or sql script that you can make very fast run automatically
with a cron job or maybe something in selenium and now you have made your non-technical role
technical you did it and if you wanted to find out how it really just takes maybe a weekend of
going down the youtube rabbit hole of how cronjob selenium and python works it's not going to take
just a weekend to understand every single piece of the code do not think that theoretical learning
is the same as practical implementation but if you can implement you are doing 80 of the job of a
data scientist googling and copying code one thing that clement agrees on he even made an entire
video about is that the most important skill a technical person a software engineer a data
scientist can have is to be able to expertly copy code find out what is good about a code find out
what works and find out what will work for this specific project or problem that you're currently
having while you're at this internship especially especially if you're not working on proprietary
information if you're actually working on maybe creating content which is something i was tasked
with creating how-to videos on how to use the product make sure to start building a social media
platform for yourself does that mean start checking in on foursquare or adding tom as a
friend on myspace no not exactly i mean to start building a medium account start blogging start
putting your projects and the other technical ways you'd be able to automate the non-automatable
usually for business development positions or non-technical positions in a blog so
that recruiters can find you in the future so they can start trailblazing the path for other
non-technical people let me tell you the reason why the fact is a lot of people are just like you
overworked they don't have a lot of time on their hands because they're constantly trying to chase
these small amounts of entertainment in netflix or a can of beer or unwinding and nighttime if you
can start hacking your behavior so that blogging and creating youtube videos perhaps is your
entertainment then you can start being a better version of yourself by one getting recruiters
on your social media so now the next time they do research and dig into your application then your
name they just try to google your name your first thing that pops up is all the useful information
that you've been able to provide the internet so that's something that is beneficial for you
the next thing is that it's really beneficial to the community of people that you've been able to
learn from remember being an expert copier of code well who do you think wrote all those help
articles who do you think wrote all those stack exchange comments and all of the answers that
ultimately got you to where you are start putting it back into the community start building out the
timeline for which you becoming a more technical person and ultimately that is a compelling story
that a recruiter can look up before they even consider your application and especially before
they auto reject your application at the end of the day my summer was full of trying to understand
how to film myself in a compelling way i didn't really become a youtuber out of it you know
i put videos on youtube of how to use the product uh and it was painful and i wasn't
really tasked with this project it was my manager talking about the idea that you know you could
do this non-technical video making project and i said yeah that's a concrete idea let me jump on it
by not having any ideas of my own i had to accept all of the non-technical ideas because i was a
hard worker i wanted to do something this summer that contributed to the company that's the last
thing that i'll leave you with don't conflate the idea that you doing a good job for the company is
you doing a good job for your own portfolio and your resume now at the end of the day
that project is something that i cannot talk about right i cannot bring up in an interview that i
just made youtube videos all summer really bad ones where i don't even show my face
and i'm just showing people how to use the product uh because they wanted to seo their brand and they
wanted a business development intern to do it if i sat down a couple weeks in advance and wrote out
all of the technical things that i could do for the company and then made it my number one goal
to pitch one of those ideas as a technical possibility for my capstone project that summer
then i would be able to talk about it to this day unfortunately i didn't go into that internship
with much of a plan just know that you're not the only one most people who run internship teams
are probably not thinking that much about you they're probably just thinking about
their bottom line they're thinking about how they can make their own portfolio seem better it's the
curse of having to climb that bureaucratic managerial ladder they need to see output
from you and they're probably not thinking too hard about how that's going to affect your career
trajectory in the future i shouted out trend black in this video if you wanted to be shouted out with
your brand in a future video then you know what to do screenshot this video put it in your instagram
stories and then tag me andrew mo money so that i can see it for you to win a chance to be featured
in the next video today's trivia question is about sql why do window functions exist
what purpose do they serve over just the simple aggregations that we can do with group by leave
your answer down below i'll collect some of the right answers and i'm going to give away a free
consultation the last consultation i gave was to diane white we chose to talk about data science
you can choose to talk about anything you want and if you wanted to talk about meatball or sports or
i don't know anything about sports please don't talk to me about sports uh unless it's d
as always for now but not for forever i'll talk to you guys next time peace
he wants left you want love
he wants love we all want love