When I did the series about Getting to iHub, I mentioned that I may do a post on why it’s such an awesome place to intern. This is that post. This is how I would convince any student in this country to come work for us, the reasons I’d give them. 

1. The Dress Code

The first thing is that you get to come to work dressed in whatever fashion suits you; for me that is jeans, t-shirt and sneakers. I remember when I came for my first day I asked my supervisor, who was dressed in jeans, sneakers and a sweater, whether there was a dress code and he chuckled saying that I was free to come in anything I was comfortable in. Of course I would have noticed if I had been paying more attention to the environment while I was there for the interview, but I was completely focused on not letting my nervousness overcome me. 

So this will be a post just recapping some of the things I’ve said in the last four posts. Think of it as the tl;dr of them

Find and follow companies that inspire you. I’ve been a white member(registered) at the iHub since it’s inception in 2010, I follow them on Twitter, read the email newsletters they send and have their blog listed in my feed. I would never have found out about Umati without all these measures. I do this with other cool companies. 

This will be the penultimate post of the series. I had been called in to interview. I was stoked, but at the same time super apprehensive. I had never done an interview before and wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew that iHub was a cool company and seeing that it was for an internship position I was hoping that I wouldn’t be asked to demonstrate any complex coding.

I did however do a few things to prepare. I first made sure that everything I had mentioned in my cover letter I could demonstrate or explain clearly. Which included the facial recognition project I had done and the methods I used. I googled likely interview questions for interns and made sure that those that applied to me I could answer without hesitation. And finally I read everything I could about iHub research and got to know the people I may be interviewing with.

Now I had my CV and a decent cover letter. So what next? Well what happened next was a series of very fortunate coincidences that would lead me to an interview with iHub research.

The first thing was when Rachel, the old community manager at iHub came to my school with Intel to train students on their Native Development Kit. I won the phone, an Intel YOLO, they were giving away by being the most awesome tweeter (twitterer? Either way follow me on twitter) And I got to have a chat with her as she was leading the team that had come to my school. She had just given me her card.

So yesterday (9.4.14), I put up a post that began to describe how I got an internship opportunity at iHub Research. In this post I’ll be putting up sections of the original cover letter I wrote. I’ve only edited it to remove some sensitive information.

[My name and introduction were here talking about where I’m from and where I live]

I was reading your quarterly report for the end of the last quarter and something that jumped at me as really interesting was the Umati project on monitoring the internets for inflammatory speech that could help spark violence offline. Umati found that online speech did not directly lead to violence offline but did offer useful insight into what issues need to be addressed to head of violence on the ground

I have been working with iHub, under their research arm as a research associate (my own way of saying intern because associate sounds better), for the last month, and since the beginning I’ve been meaning to do a couple of posts on  how exactly I got there and what it takes to get an internship at an organisation like iHub, an organisation I believe hasn’t advertised for internship for the past 3 years.