From Ukraine to USA as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon Alexa: Yurii Rebryk
Not long ago while searching for great tech talents all around the world to learn from, I came across with Yurii Rebryk’s interview on YouTube Channel of Victoria Borodina (Co-Founder at uDevs.com | Technical Recruiter). I watched the video till the end and loved it! Yurii has so many internship experiences and lots to tell us about them. So, taking the opportunity I held a video call interview session with Yurii so people from all over the world could get inspired from him.
Here is what you need to know about Yurii in short:
- Born in Ukrain
- Studied in a Turkish School with subjects in English Language
- Continued his school education in Kiev
- Went to St.Petersburg, Russia to study programming
- He is now a second year Masters Student in Programming and Data Analysis at Higher School of Economics in St.Petersburg, Russia
- Currently he is an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon Alexa
After a short introduction to his background, Yurii moved on to his internship experiences. He mentioned that, “I started my internships a bit late actually — last year of bachelors degree. Although most students were doing their internships after their second year, I came to this decision on my last year”.
I applied to Google and got rejected at first, but then I applied again and got an internship in Software Engineering, Google New York Office. After his Google Internship, Yurii continued applying to more companies and started receiving more offers. While being an intern there is also the possibility of receiving a full time job offer, although it may not be guaranteed. However, Yurii had different plans for his life, so he continued searching for internships in different companies to gain more experience.
As I was doing my internship, I decided that I do not want to stick to any companies at the moment. I want to try out at different companies, learn about their work culture, engage with others, grow my network and develop myself further. So currently I am an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon in Seattle, US. — Yurii
After his internship in Google, Yurii also interned at NVIDIA as Deep Learning Researcher and at Lyft as Computer Vision Engineer.
Why did you choose to intern in Machine Learning? Is there interest to Machine Learning in Russia?
“I decided to go with Machine Learning Internships abroad, because I already had enough experience and clear image about software engineering internships. In Moscow Machine Learning has gained huge interest of programmers actually. At the moment in Moscow there is a huge global community called Open Data Science that unites all researchers, engineers and developers in Data Science and related areas. They have a very big Telegram Community — more than 15000 people following them.”
You have attended many hackathons and competitions prior to your internships. Would you say that these competitions have helped you when applying for internships?
Absolutely. Firstly I got to learn that there are many competitions out there which I can join and didn’t know about. There, not only you compete with teams, but also you grow your network and push your limits in programming.
So would you suggest others to go for different internships before landing their full time job?
I personally think that Internships give the opportunity to learn and develop yourself faster. It’s a good way to meet new people and grow your network. For example, I know that I could just accept a full-time job right after university or first internship, and work there for years. However, it wouldn’t give me the same experiences which I receive at the moment from internships of different companies.
What about your Dream Job? Or Dream Company?
Yurii laughs and says, “Well — my own company! Although I haven’t come around the idea, I have the desire and passion to create my own company”.
I must say it was definitely one of the most interesting interviews I had. It’s great to see so much passion and desire in someone who is trying to develop and continue learning nonstop. Yurii can land a full time job anytime, but he chooses to spend his time to learn and grow as much as he can.
If you are interested to follow Yurii’s path, you can join his social media platforms:
- YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC123vp1vGDz_cjKnzUXI_1A
- Telegram — https://t.me/rebryktravel
- Habr (Blog) — https://habr.com/en/users/Rebryk/
Thank you Yurii for the interview!
