Over the course of the initial weeks of this internship I have been able to gain new expertise and knowledge. I was introduced to the concepts of web scraping and recommender systems. I also learnt how to use web scraping as a tool to collect data for further use and analysis in projects. Doing this, I have learnt how to utilize Beautiful Soup and Selenium. I got the opportunity to touch up on my data science skills with pandas as well. I have not only been able to gain technical skills, but also soft skills. These include skills developed from working with people from different places and on different time zones such as communication skills online which is crucial when working remote.
One achievement for me was getting my development environment set up with the new tools I’m using for web scraping. I was also able to learn how to use jupyter notebook effectively and scrape a website on my own.
So far I have attended various workshops to get my skill sets up to date. These include sessions regarding git + github, recommender systems, web scraping, and manipulating data (pandas). I have also been attending regular team meetings and maintaining communication.
My goals for the week are to continue practicing with web scraping and to get more familiar with it so I can apply to other scenarios along with the internship. I also hope to learn more about recommender systems and how to use machine learning once I have collected the necessary data.
I have mainly been focused on learning the new content and mastering it such that I can use it for the Machine Learning project. My major difficulty was getting the development environment set up on my computer. However, I was able to get help from online resources and a fellow intern in the slack group to resolve my issues.