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.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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.