During my internship at Wayfair, I gained a completely different perspective on the functionalities within an organization. I learnt about personalizing recommendations for customers who view your websites, keeping in mind their likes and dislikes and a myriad of other factors such as age, gender and demographics.
I have always enjoyed shopping online, but the efforts that go behind making this experience a seamless one was quite a surprise. I am proud that I have learnt a number of new and in-demand technologies like Python, Redis, Jenkins, Git and Data Science to achieve this goal. These technologies are always in the state of constant upgrade and are difficult to learn and use from the word go.
Fortunately, with the unwavering help of my team and my manager, this learning process was smooth and I cherished it. Personally, I’m proud of how quickly I grasped these new technologies and implemented them to code and personalize the Wayfair website for our customers. Additionally, I received a lot of accolades from my team for having succeeded in delivering an interesting and valuable feature enhancement to the existing product.
iSchool Experience That Helped Me
Thanks to the iSchool, I wasn’t subject to a bombardment of technical jargon. I actually knew what I was working on. I have studied at the iSchool for 2 semesters and I took up courses related to data science.
I studied R and Python extensively in these 2 semesters. The course work helped me a lot in terms of learning new tools and technologies as I knew the basics and had used them in iSchool.
Asking Questions The Right Way
The most important lesson I learnt during this time was to not shy away from asking questions when you are stuck.
Do not hesitate to go around and ask for help. That’s what your mentor and team is there for. Remember, the team succeeds as a whole or fails as a whole. That being said, do not barrage them with questions without putting ample amount of thought and effort into it first!
A trick I followed was to make a list of resources I could look up and things I could try myself and only when I felt content with my efforts, would I go ahead and ask for their help. My manager specifically pointed out this quality of mine and said he approved of it – and others should follow it, too.
People are willing to help you. Always remember that.
