Data Science Masters

September 30, 2019

Summer Internship Profile: Prakhar Agarwal

Name: Prakhar Agarwal

Position: Machine Learning Intern

Company: Apple Inc.

Location: Cupertino, CA.

Congratulations on your summer internship! Tell us about the position.

I worked on Knowledge Extraction for the Maps team at Apple.

My internship involved natural language processing, feature extraction and building a context-aware human intent inference. I was involved in the entire pipeline, starting with data (purification, enrichment, and matching), defining the model evaluation metric, training the Deep Learning model and serving the model as an API for downstream consumption.

I also worked with other senior engineers and scientists on a wide spectrum of machine learning and data science approaches to improving the user’s search experience.

What resources did you utilize in your summer internship search? 

In terms of resources, I used the following:

  • Data Science Career Fair – Submitting your resume to the recruiters at career fairs goes a long way
  • Employee referral – I reached out to my friends, cohort members, and previous colleagues with my resume to refer me for positions
  • Handshake online job and internship database
  • Networking at open houses

What skills from the MSDS program are you applying to the internship? 

The Data 511: Data Visualization for Data Scientists course provided me with a set of tools to effectively communicate results.

My understanding of Kernel Methods from Data 558: Statistical Machine Learning for Data Science enabled me to add non-linearity to any linear model.

What tips do you have for incoming students who are thinking ahead about summer internships? 

First and foremost, start early! Have a concise, well-written resume ready. Customize your resume for each role. You should have an updated LinkedIn. This will help you get noticed by companies.

Identify the gaps in your preparation and try to address them. If you think you lack strong coding skills, work on this problem, and fix it to the best of your ability. It is important to realize that there are no shortcuts to being prepared.