In any student’s life, there is a very special place for a first internship. Because at this age, you are still very naive about things you had learned at the same time, you are super excited to create an impact in your respective field of interest. The exposure to different things from such experiences intrigues you to do more exciting things. It’s the first time you get a chance to see how things are done professionally and see how you can apply your learnings to solve particular problems. Hence I was super excited about this opportunity. I am glad I got a chance to intern in one of the prominent MNC’s: MasterCard, this summer.

I was a Data Science Intern in the Brighterion AI team at MasterCard. This team provides scalable AI solutions to credit card fraud detection, risk management, healthcare problems, and many more.

How did it start?

Initially, I was unsure whether we will get a chance to do any internship during our summer break because of the covid-19 outbreak. Our semester started a bit late, and college administration decided to squeeze in our summer break to begin next semester on time. But later, luckily, they agreed to give us seven weeks of summer break, and we were allowed to do an internship in that period. MasterCard had internship openings in the AI garage.

My work:

In the credit risk management domain, I worked on the problem of predicting credit delinquency. In layman’s term: Prediction of customers who may not pay their credit card bills in the future. I developed a deep learning-based architecture to capture patterns in delinquent customers.

Things I learned:

  • Importance of defining the problem statement clearly

If you and your manager are on different pages about the interpretation of the problem statement, then you will have a hard time in your internship. Because then you may end up wasting time on working unnecessary things. It’s better to ask for clarifications and be sure that your understanding of the expected task is the same as the team.

  • Bussiness understanding about problem statement

It’s essential to know how your work impacts business and what the client wants. It enables you to think about the problem statement from another dimension. In my internship, I got the chance to attend meetings with clients to understand their points of view, which helped me fine-tune my solution.

Funny experiences: :laughing:

The way you do things on your PC, and corporate machines are very different. You can directly install/uninstall programs, change settings, and do whatever you wish on your machine. But on corporate devices, the struggle starts from entering their corporate environment using VPNs. The tough row to hoe is when you can’t even enter in their network, and then in this virtual setting, they can’t probe your machine to get access and figure out what’s wrong because it’s not connected to their “secure” network, which makes it worse to solve this problem. Yeah, I faced this situation!

In short: you work in userspace for corporate machines, and you don’t have admin rights to change/ install/ uninstall any critical programs.

Potterheads like me who graduated from Hogwarts were disappointed :disappointed: to know commands like this were not working.

sudo accio caffeine

Wow moments for me: :open_mouth:

  • My fanboy moment when I got a chance to see Andrew Ng live in a webinar talking about ethics, fairness in AI.
  • I got an opportunity to interact with many influential people in MasterCard, including Michael Miebach - CEO of MasterCard.
  • My first salary :heart: - Nothing can replace this feeling!

Overall, my experience was good. I just wanted to document my journey so that I can later visit this, smile. :grin:

Tiny note: At the time of editing this post, I have 2 assignments due. Questionable life choices, I know!