Internship reflection: Maxime’s experience at Agilytic

What drew you to apply to the data science internship?

I was looking for an internship offering the opportunity to challenge my skills and apply all the theoretical knowledge that I learned at the university during my specialized master's in Data Science (ULB). I feared finding an internship labeled as a data scientist but with data analyst projects in the day-to-day job. Alex, a Senior Data Scientist on the team, motivated me to apply, assuring me that I would not be disappointed regarding my expectations. 100% accurate!

Can you tell us about the projects you worked on during your internship?

I had the chance to work on three different topics. Firstly, the biggest project of my internship was the development of a recommendation algorithm for a Belgian company specializing in recruitment. Secondly, I got the chance to continue the exploration started a few months ago by Clément about fraud detection on forged documents. Something totally new and unexpected for me. Finally, I learned how to scrape a website and assess the scraping complexity of a website. This drove me on two web scraping projects looking for competitor monitoring. During these projects, I have been lucky to collaborate with the other members of Agilytic and benefit from their experience and coaching.

What professional skills did you gain from the internship? What training did you receive?

My newfound skills are multiplied and diverse. From a hard skill point of view, I learned much about recommendation algorithms, fraud detection, and web scraping. Regarding what I would call corporate skills, I learned to work with others on the same projects, refactor a code, to make a code understandable and exploitable by someone else. Finally, in terms of soft skills, I have been coached by Agilytic to improve my teamwork skills, communication skills (to convey a clear and straight to the point message or ask a straightforward question), and to reflect my inner confidence. Agilytic taught me a lot. It brought my master to a totally new level!

What was the best part about interning at Agilytic?

Being continuously happy to go each day to my internship to learn and collaborate with incredibly nice and caring people!