Tanya is a student in Stanford University, majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science, and has just completed her internship at VMware Bulgaria.
How did you end up doing an internship at VMware Bulgaria?
I came back to Bulgaria during the academic year since Stanford went online due to the pandemic. One of the first things I did was to search for the best internship opportunities in Bulgaria and this brought me to the career portal of VMware. There, I applied for a software engineering position and after couple of interviews, I was matched with a project that was very well suited for me. Kudos to Diana, my recruiter!
What’s the project you work on?
I worked on a Data Science project aiming to utilize the vSphere customer data that VMware collects. The core idea was to first create a customer segmentation that would give us insights about different kinds of users and then allow these insights to guide us further into exploring the specifics of the data.
How do you find the internship program?
My personal experience with the program was very positive. My experience with Data Science was limited to the theoretical part of the field, thus applying this knowledge in practice was very valuable to me. Moreover, I could not have better mentors who are both very valuable and patient teachers – I cannot express in words how much they contributed to my development!
I also participated in a program called Women Connect Women – a coaching and mentoring program providing younger women employees with support from more experienced women colleagues. My mentor is a QA which is a very different role from mine. She showed me how one of her typical days pass, which brought me a much better understanding of her job.
What are the biggest benefits of the internship program for you personally?
As a college student with close to zero experience, it is very hard to know what in reality stays behind the titles ‘QA’ or ‘Data Scientist’. The internship program provided me with the opportunities to understand better what working in a large company feels like and what is it that you actually do on the job of a data scientist.
