AstraZeneca Internship

My First Company Internship!

I can’t believe I was up and about, interacting with other hackathon participants earlier this year. I hope I get to do the same again soon.. :(

I had to do a work-from-home internship. Even then, I learnt so many new concepts! I’m really grateful to my mentor and my manager at AstraZeneca for guiding me throughout the virtual internship.

The entire experience was smooth! Hats off to the AZ Campus IT Team, for making the onboarding process smooth.

What I worked on

I worked on problems in Cheminformatics and Bioinformatics. For the problem in Cheminformatics, I implemented Graph Neural Networks, and for the problem in Bioinformatics, I optimized a Feature Extraction step.

I’m still thrilled by how cool the problems I worked on were!!! AZ really did a great job conducting the hackathon. They have shown how cool the projects they’re working on actually are!

What Data Science in a big company is like

This is the first company I’ve ever worked at. It was such an interesting experience. They had different teams, with defined purposes. The AstraZeneca Lab had generated the data for the Cheminformatics problem I worked on, through experiments.

As a Data Scientist, my job was only to work on the available data, and provide valuable feedback, and ways in which the existing system can be optimized.

This internship also taught me what working in real life is like. I did my best to balance my personal time and time for work! (Didn’t say I succeeded. xD)

Closing Remarks

The applications of Machine Learning I explored at AZ were super interesting! The discussions I had with my mentor were always insightful. I learnt something new in every meeting. I hope to apply what I learnt in this internship everywhere else I go (or maybe again at AstraZeneca, someday).

Again, I’m deeply grateful, especially to my mentor, for being patient enough to teach me so many concepts I wasn’t aware of.

I wish everyone at AstraZeneca well, and I hope they find a vaccine for Coronavirus and save humanity!

Thank You, AstraZeneca! :D