MY HAMOYE INTERNSHIP EXPERIENCE

The six months internship program have definitely been life changing as it paved a new path in my data science career, one where I got to build systems from scratch to improve existing structures. This journey started when I received an auspicious mail stating I qualified for a 6 months internship program with an organization called Hamoye. Honestly, this news came as a surprise as I couldn’t even recall applying for the program, considering I had just begun my data science career.

This experience has definitely been the best in my data science career as I was always on my toes throughout the whole period of the imposed lockdown due to the novel covid 19 virus. The structure of the internship was very effective as it helped make my learning consistent especially for a beginner like myself to data science. From stage A down to stage G, there was always something new to learn and prizes to be won.

Another thing of note was the different tracks we were divided into- The Data Storytelling, Data Science and Data Engineering Track. I was initially perplexed as I had only known about Data Science all my life. I inferred the Data storytelling was more of data visualization and analytics (although there was more to it) but Data Engineering and MLOps picked my interest. The Data Engineering track was not a bed of roses and this definitely explained our small numbers (less than 200 out of 2000+ interns) which drastically reduced as the internship progressed. The first lesson- Introduction to the google cloud platform, Kubernetes and Kubeflow had me going back and forth for weeks, getting frustrated and almost regretting my track choice, but there was something Mr. Charles Adetiloye (Co-Founder, Mavencode LLC) said during one of our weekly webinars

“It’s good to make these mistakes at the beginning, because it helps build your knowledge”

And it was at that webinar, I knew I had to overcome the challenges I was facing to becoming a successful data Engineer. Luckily I was able to get assistance from the Hamoye team and my fellow interns which helped me get through that stage and with continuous practice I got better. In no time, I was able to start working in a team on open source projects, building pipelines and deploying models. For someone who had no clue about the whole Data Engineering career path, this is a remarkable achievement for me and it is all thanks to the Hamoye Internship program.

Overall, this internship experience has been a wonderful one and I look forward to building myself on this newly found path. Also I would love to appreciate the Hamoye team for organizing this program and sincerely hope the end of this internship wouldn’t be the end of our journey together.