Back to intern storiesarrow_right_alt

Intern Stories

Louis

University of Auckland

Bachelor of Engineering with Honours | Engineering Science

It's been invaluable, being introduced to the applications

It was at BESA's 2022 speed interview event that Louis stumbled across Tidy. A few chats and drinks down the line, he added Kevin; CEO of Tidy, on LinkedIn to stay in touch about internship opportunities. A couple of weeks later, Louis had an interview with his future team, then received the offer shortly after.

As Tidy's head office is based in Tauranga, Louis worked from home throughout most of his internship. However, he also headed to Tidy's part-time Auckland office once a week to work with some of the team in-person.

The most interesting thing he worked on was building a neural network.

"Basically, it's an extremely complicated mathematical algorithm. It should determine whether a specific trialist will to convert to a customer based on information like when they signed up, what country they're from, and stuff like that."

Louis learnt a lot during his internship, and one of the most unexpected things was the difference between university and working with real data.

"One surprising thing is how iterative the engineering process is. In uni, the processes are very artificial in the way they're dreamed up by the lecturer. In reality, the scope of the problem isn't really understood, and it's only when you continue that you realise it's very different. Heading back to uni, I'll be better at my programming paper for sure. This has given me a lot of experience that will be very useful. It's been invaluable, being introduced to the applications."

In December 2022, Louis had the opportunity to take part in Tidy's "Office Week." This is a biannual event where all Tidy employees across the country head to the Tauranga office for a week to work together and participate in team bonding activities. His most memorable moment from this was going go-karting with the team.

Lastly, three words Louis would use to sum up his experience are:

"Intriguing - being introduced to topics that I'm very green to.
Challenging - at times, I had problems I had no experience in.
Fun - not only because of Office Week, but because I enjoyed the things I was doing."

Louis conintues to work at Tidy part-time while he continues his studies