My experience as an Intern at Orfium

As I was getting closer to finishing my studies at the National Technical University of Athens, I started wondering about what my next steps would be. How would I be able to transfer all the knowledge that I accumulated in the university, in a “real-world” working environment? Would I be able to find a job that would fit my expectations and allow me to work on things that I like and I am interested in?

I decided that doing an internship would be the best move to kick off my career. Admittedly, looking for a data science internship in Greece is not an easy task. After some interviews with many companies, I finally got one with Orfium as well. Immediately, I noticed how passionate everyone is about their job and how they share a common vision for Orfium as a whole. They told me how I was expected to work on actual projects and contribute actively rather than waste my time and energy on small tasks, like many other students do. After a short conversation with Pantelis Vikatos(Head of Research) and Athanasia Zelenitsa(Head of People & Culture) I was already sold on working for Orfium. Thankfully, they also thought that my skills would be a great asset to their team and thus my journey in Orfium was about to begin.

At first, I was a bit nervous, as to how everything would work out. Pantelis, my supervisor and also an amazing scientist, had already informed me during the summer about my project. I had already studied and prepared thoroughly for my tasks but I was unsure about how a company actually works and operates. Would I have freedom to tackle problems on my own? Would I really get into a serious project as I was promised? Or would I just be filling up Excel sheets?

Right from the start, my questions were all answered, and they were answered exactly as I would have wanted them to be. Everyone in Orfium was friendly and helpful. I felt right at home with everybody there, from my team members to the human resources and culture department. But that was not even the best part…

The best part of my internship was my project. Orfium as a company specializes in the music industry and has a lot of applications and tools for Youtube. A new service that was being created right as I started was Video Matching. So the biggest part of that service was to create a model that could calculate the similarity between videos.

As a benchmark we used a pretrained model, but that model was not good enough for our needs. And this is where I came in. I had to create the training process of that model in order to retrain it again from scratch to achieve better results. Working on something so interesting, and at the same time important, immediately gave me motivation to study and work hard. I had freedom to investigate and tackle the problem whichever way I believed, but I was also able to seek help from my mentors, who were always there to discuss and guide me.

The weeks passed and I made great progress on my project and also many other tasks that popped up at the same time. Every task was unique and helped me gain knowledge and experience. In the end, after I finished everything, I made a presentation for the whole team, to keep everyone up to date, and got ready to continue on my next task

After two months here at Orfium, I can safely say that it was an amazing experience, especially because of the incredible amount of things I learnt. It would not be an overstatement to say that those two months at Orfium were more beneficial to me than a full year in university, and definitely more fun as a process.

I was able to dive deeper into the concept of neural networks and deep learning algorithms. I developed my skills in python and frameworks like tensorflow and got in touch with new technologies like AWS/Sagemaker. But technical knowledge was not even the best thing gained from this experience. In my opinion, the biggest advantage of working in Orfium was the hands on experience of a real company. I learned about the different departments, the way they work and most importantly the way I should work and organize myself in this kind of environment

After finishing my internship in Orfium, I am confident that I made the right decision. Now, with my studies coming to an end I am excited to continue working officially at Orfium as a member of the data science team!

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