Welcome to the Joma show, the show
where we talk about tips and tricks
on how to land a successful career in tech.
In this show, sometimes I have guests.
Sometimes I don't, like today, I don't have any guests.
Most of the time I will not have any guests.
Because Silicon Valley people are quite busy.
So today we're going to talk about how
to land your first internship.
And how am I going to talk about this?
I'm going to talk about through my lens,
through my experiences.
Rather than telling you what to do,
I'll just tell you exactly what I did.
And not saying that's the best way to do it,
but I'm sharing my story.
After this video, I'm going to talk about
all my other internships.
For example, how to get internship at Citadel.
How to get an internship at LinkedIn.
How to transition into data science at Facebook.
And then how to transition again into PM at Microsoft.
So if you're interested in all those companies,
don't forget to press subscribe so that you get notified
when those companies come up.
Welcome to the Joma show.
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Before I start, I just want to say
that I'm not going to tell you, oh yeah, just work hard, do
practice questions and stuff like that.
The way I got things, it's not 100% merit.
I use a lot of my brothers connections.
I exaggerated my resume a lot.
And I also put projects that I never completed but said I did.
To be honest, I don't want my friends knowing.
It's embarrassing.
Which is why I'm not promoting this channel to them.
But I'm telling you guys.
Because I want to be fully transparent.
Or else, in the end, I'm only going
to be talking about vague shit.
And I don't want to talk about vague shit.
I just want to talk about concrete things
on exactly how to get those internships.
All right.
So let's get started.
I'm going to look at my old resume for reference.
Because it's been a while.
And I don't remember what exactly I did.
So as you can see, I wrote a lot of cover letters.
That's how I started.
But I just want to look at my resume.
I think it's this one.
I'm not sure.
It might be this one.
Yeah, that's it.
So work experience, I still had no work experience.
I worked at McDonald's and Statistics Canada.
I just knock on people's doors.
Let's see.
This sounds about right.
Nah, actually, I'm going to take the longer one.
Is it this one?
I had multiple resumes.
So the first thing I learned about getting internship
is they told me to make my resume one page.
Because they don't have enough time to read all of them.
So I have one resume where I just have everything
that I've accomplished.
And then I shorten it depending on if I
want to apply for finance or software.
Let me just try to remember what I did.
Cool.
I think I remember now.
All right.
My first exposure into programming was CRC Robotics.
This is something that I did in high school.
It's not really high school.
It's Cegep.
Because I'm from Quebec.
But you don't need to know what that is.
CRC Robotics, basically, we had to build robots.
And then we compete against each other.
And so for example, one of the tests
was that you had to program your robot to autonomously do
a few things.
So that's where programming came along.
So that was my first exposure.
It was called ROBOTC apparently, the language.
It just looks like C++.
And then my brother was also graduating
from Waterloo, which is the school that I was going to go,
University of Waterloo.
And then he told me about computer science.
He said, oh, you could have this thing called code programs
where you could write stuff and then you
could input stuff and then output stuff.
I thought it was the most boring shit ever.
But he told me that you could get pretty sick jobs
at Facebook and stuff like that.
So then I started learning something
called DrRacket or Scheme, which is fucking stupid.
Because I don't think any company uses it.
So I don't know why I was learning that.
But apparently that's the first thing you learn at school.
The first course is called CS135 or something.
And then I dabble into that.
And then I learned about Python and what Python was.
So then I was doing Harvard classes online, the really easy
ones.
OK, they're not really easy.
Because I did the first course.
I thought it was bomb.
And then when it comes to object oriented shit,
I'm like, what the fuck?
I just couldn't understand.
I didn't even pass that level.
So I had a very basic literacy of Python.
Oh, yeah.
True.
I have to talk about my school.
Because I think that's an important piece.
So I went to University of Waterloo.
I could tell you how I got in there.
But you probably don't need to.
Because it's super easy to get into.
Waterloo is pretty special in the fact
that you have to do five to six internships before you
graduate.
So they have this system called Job Mine.
And you have to apply to jobs using that system
every other semester.
And it makes getting internships a lot easier.
So if you have something like that in school,
make sure you take advantage of it.
Because that's usually how you'll
get your first tech internship.
Your first internship is usually the hardest one.
Because you have no experience.
And you only have side projects.
If you have bomb ass side projects,
it's going to be pretty easy for you.
If you don't, you should do some.
You don't need to finish them.
To be honest, you could even lie a little bit.
But just make sure that when you're
asked questions about it, you can answer them fully.
So fast forward to a year.
It's job fair.
I mean, we don't call it job fair.
We have some program called Job Mine where you just
put your resume, put your cover letter,
and send it to companies.
Let me show you something.
So here's the folder that I use to organize
all of the applications.
So I had a cover letter for each and every company.
It was crazy.
It's basically the same thing.
But I just changed the name of the company and the reasons
why I'm a good fit.
I think I got a few responses, maybe 10 responses out of 50.
And then out of those interviews,
I only got I think two or three jobs.
I think one was QA position at some Waterloo company.
I don't remember what it was.
But it was some basic shit.
And then I also got my first internship,
which is Scotiabank.
So back to my resume.
I'm going to tell you how I got that, Well, how
I think I got that first job.
It's not exactly software engineering.
But we did a lot of software engineering.
I did a lot of C++ there.
I did some VBA coding thing, which is not something software
people would do.
So not going to lie, the first job I got,
it's not best job ever.
I mean, Scotiabank, [GAG].
You probably don't even know what Scotiabank is.
It's a Canadian bank by the way.
Not prestigious at all.
It's crap to be honest.
But the position was quite good.
It's called Credit-- no, what was it again?
Equity and Credit Derivatives.
And I'll tell you a little bit about that
and how I got into that.
So what Credit and Derivatives-- oh yeah.
True.
I forgot to talk about this.
I was in math and business.
I wasn't in computer science back then.
I actually wanted to be an investment banker or something.
I didn't even want to be a software engineer.
Mostly I thought I was going to be and investment
banker or a trader.
So I was really into finance stuff.
And I did two projects.
So the first project is Intrade.
So Intrade was a website that you could bet on events.
So how it works is, for example, if you thought
Obama was going to win the election,
then you have a marketplace for that.
For example, if the price is at $9.00 and you buy at $9
and Obama actually wins the election,
then it will automatically go up to $10.
So it's $0 to $10.
So then you would gain $1.
If he'd lost the election, it will go to $0.
So that means all the money invested, the $9
invested, you'll lose it all and it will become $0.
So basically it's like a stock market.
And then also, my brother told me that, oh,
it's actually a binary option.
I don't want to bore you with the details.
But basically, in a finance world,
whatever I was playing with in that website
were binary options.
And he told me that, oh, do you want
to work on a project together, my brother and I.
And then I said, yeah, sure, why not.
So then he told me, oh, why don't you write
a Python bot that trades these options automatically.
I didn't really know anything about finance,
but then I learned.
I learned that you could price a binary option.
I just went to Wikipedia.
You could Google binary option.
And there's something called a Black-Scholes motto
that you can you input your numbers
and then have a guesstimate on how much it would cost.
And usually it would be pretty accurate.
So we did that for a couple of months I think.
And it was actually a really basic bot.
It was terrible actually.
There was no try catch errors or whatever.
It was pretty shit.
But I still did it.
And we still made money-ish.
So then now I had a pretty good fundamental knowledge
on options for trading.
And then the second project, I did RITC.
This is a Rotman International Trading Competition.
It's not technical at all.
You have Excel spreadsheets.
You write some VBA code to try to facilitate your trading.
I basically wrote some VBA macros
to facilitate in our pricing of the assets
so that we could trade.
I did really well on a case that was the options case.
So I understood calls and puts.
Ooh.
It's not a lot.
But it's enough to impress them as a freshman.
I interviewed for Scotiabank.
I also interviewed for other companies.
But I'll just talk about Scotiabank.
And then what they asked me was, first,
they asked me some C++ related questions.
Oh, what's object oriented programming
and stuff, inheritance, and stuff like that.
And then they asked me some linked lists
questions I remember I think.
And then they also asked me a binary search problem.
For example, can you use binary search
to find if a number exists?
I think they give you an array of assorted number.
So first, the easiest solution would be just go linearly.
But that would be you have to know your time complexity
stuff.
So then first to brute force ways is just scan it linearly.
And then later on they say can you do it any better?
And then that's where you put out the binary search method.
And then I think that's it.
That's the hardest questions there.
So it was pretty simple.
Because it's a finance company.
They don't ask you hard shit.
Next they asked me some call and put options.
I think they drew a line, which is the payout line,
and then they told me, oh, what combination of calls and puts
is that?
And can you tell me how to combine them
so that your payout option looks like that?
Sorry that I'm talking about this.
Because it's not really software related.
But that's what they asked me.
So then I got that question right.
And then went home.
And then they called me back a week later.
And they said that I was the number one candidate for them.
And then they wanted to offer me a job.
That was great.
I got the job.
And that's how I got my first internship.
So that's pretty much it.
Let me see if I forgot anything.
Oh, yeah, true.
So I guess I did a lot of random shit, too.
And I'll tell you things that are
iffy that might have helped, but also might not have helped
and also that I didn't do but I wrote that I did.
So here you could see I got a Facebook Hacker Cup.
I wrote annual worldwide program competition hosted by Facebook.
Develop problem solving skills through completing
their programming puzzles.
I didn't even do any of them.
I think I did one or two.
I got one of them and then I failed the other two.
I didn't even make it to the second round.
Pygame.
I made a stupid ass game using Pygame.
I think it was just a ball that runs around and shoots balls
at things.
And then Google AI Challenge.
Oh, that's the worst.
I didn't even do that.
So basically the Google AI Challenge I remember
was as a game of Plant Wars.
There was another game like this that you could
play for real, not using bots.
You have planets.
And then you could shoot spaceships onto another planet
to capture it if you have more spaceships
than the other planet.
So you could program a bot to play that game.
But I didn't even do it.
I think I just downloaded the sample bot
and changed a few parameters and just tried it out.
But I didn't even know how to run it or test it and stuff.
So I didn't even do that.
But I still put it in there.
And I also had some stupid shit just to fill in my resume,
like poker.
Because I thought that's for trading.
Oh, traders love poker.
So I talked about my poker.
This is actually real.
I'm pretty proud of my poker games and my profit there.
I even put my art stuff.
I don't know why I put that.
Oh, yeah, I guess I have to say that I
did get good grades in school.
So that might have helped.
Waterloo, I had cumulative average of 93.
So I was in Dean's honor list.
Never be discouraged that your first internship is shit.
Because after you get one good internship,
all the other big companies will just
come knocking at your door.
And you just get a shit ton of interviews.
So in conclusion, that was how I got my first tech internship.
And it wasn't a great tech internship.
Because it was a no name tech internship.
And it was C++ crap.
Code base was shit.
Their tech was really bad.
But it was my first job.
And it led to how I got into Citadel.
And I'll talk about that on my next video.
Thanks for watching.
Don't forget to subscribe if you want
to know how I got into Citadel, which
I will post next time I guess.
Thanks for watching.
Peace.
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