What I learned from my academic and professional experiences
My first job was on AIESEC, in 2018. There, I was a salesperson responsible for closing deals between students or professionals interested in international experience. Besides closing deals, and establishing prices and conditions, I had to learn a lot about organization and accountability, since I was in charge of maintaining detailed records of the deals, connections, and activities on the customer database.
The best thing about that experience was that I had to understand each client’s needs and connect them with the best opportunities, it was challenging but also rewarding to evaluate the experiences and personalities of my clients and how our product would fit their lives and goals.
After that, between the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, I contributed to a small project at my university. I was responsible for creating a chatbot that would communicate with English students and help them practice their abilities. For that, I developed scripts for potential conversation flows and implemented them using XML and Python.
It was great to work on this project because I had to imagine dialogues and conversation models that would result in the most productive and educational for the undergraduates while being funny and fluid.
Between 2020 and 2022, I had my first international experience with Dock Street Trading, a company located in Indiana, USA. Other than being responsible for guaranteeing the flow of the company’s processes, I worked on a couple projects that gave me some experience in web development and data analysis.
My first project there was a data-related web application. I developed, tested, and deployed a web application using mainly HTML, CSS, ASP.NET MVC 5, and SQL Server. The application gathered and analyzed data of a client of ours, allowing the client to evaluate the most sold products considering a period and then restock considering this information, beyond other insights they could get from the application.
I contributed to other web projects, either developing, testing, or guaranteeing quality, but most of my experience was with data. I collected, processed, analyzed, and interpreted data, returning to the team data-based insights and ways to proceed.
They tried to expose me to as much knowledge as possible within the scope of the projects the company was working on. I loved the experience of dealing with such a great team, learning a lot from my senior team members, practicing and improving my English skills, as well as my technical abilities.
English has provided me with so many opportunities that I would be ungrateful to not share this with others. That is why I am on Curriculo Internacional. This initiative started back in 2020 and works by mentoring and teaching students and professionals interested in having an international career. At the moment, we have English, web programming, and robotics courses.
Here, I am a teacher and coordinator of the English course, working on preparing and delivering lectures, examinations, assignments, and reports to elementary and high school students of a countryside region of Minas Gerais. I am also a mentor, working with interns, and helping them develop their English, communication, organization, and other important skills.
It is really gratifying to work on this initiative. We currently work with around 200 people, including volunteers, students, and mentees, and our goal is to reach and positively impact more than a thousand people a year in five years.
All my experiences to this moment summed up to what I have been doing at ResultUp. Here, I worked on partnering developers with international opportunities. I recruited candidates, coordinated, and participated in the selection and examination of candidates, considering their experiences and the roles they wanted to enroll in, and the opportunities we had available.
Currently, I am working on a data dashboard. I started to enjoy working on data with Dock Street Trading, so when I had this opportunity to work with data visualization and analysis, I was happy. This project is worked on the idea of providing data-based insights using statistical tools and techniques, making use of maps, graphs, and tables.
It has been a great experience to work on ResultUp. I have space to grow, share ideas, and improve my soft and technical skills.
Summarising these learnings in the hope of being helpful to others, I would say:
Improve your communication skills and learn about effective communication. Being able to understand my clients' and coworkers' needs and translate them into deals and solutions that fulfill everyone involved has been crucial to performing and succeeding in my daily activities.
The best way to improve your skills in a certain subject is by applying them in the real world, finding projects that align with what you are learning or want to learn. I've learned a lot from courses but my confidence and skills grow as I put them to practice.
You don't have to know everything about something to teach about it. Share your knowledge with others, this will help them and will help you as well. The process allows you to find out where there are gaps of knowledge and fill them, at the same time you reiterate the things you know the most.
Experiment. Try a wide range of roles and technologies, and understand what you like and what you don't like. Being multidisciplinary will teach you things you wouldn't be able to learn by focusing on only one thing all the time.