Hi Alessandro, could you introduce yourself? Tell me where you are from, what your educational background is, if you had any prior work experience before your internship at HCSS?
Hi! My name is Alessandro, and I live in Delft, as I have for the last one-and-a-half years. I am Italian, specifically from a small town between Milan and the Lake of Como. I lived there until I got my bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. I have also spent some time in Madrid for an Erasmus semester studying Telecommunications Engineering.
I moved to the Netherlands to start a master’s degree in Engineering and Policy Analysis at TU Delft, the reason being that I wanted to specialise in applying hard-science knowledge and techniques to policy problems. The same drive led me towards this HCSS Data Internship. Except for several volunteering experiences in different local associations, this has been my first proper working experience.
Can you describe your time as a datalab intern? What does your day-to-day look like?
My day at HCSS starts in the most classical way: get a coffee, read emails, look at the calendar, plan meetings. Then, on most days, I open Visual Studio and start coding. It may also be that I am working on reporting that day so in that case I will open Word or OverLeaf and start writing.
Many days I have meetings planned: they are mainly in person, but we also have some hybrid or remote ones. In that case I take my notebook, my laptop if needed and go to one of the conference rooms downstairs. Most meetings are with one or more analysts to either be onboarded on a new project or update each other on progress. We also have monthly meetings within the Datalab to plan future work or share some ideas. Or the Datalab Academy in which we have people from within or outside HCSS sharing their knowledge on some technical topic. For example, we recently covered integration of LLMs in our workflows or data security and infrastructure.
Usually, the day ends with pushing my changes on GitHub, updating project notes and sending a message or an email to the project leader. Most of my projects I have with Jesse Kommandeur, the Datalab Manager, so we usually have a quick chat at the end of the day to plan the next steps.
Why did you decide to extend your internship at HCSS?
I am planning to pursue a PhD after I graduate, and during my HCSS internship extension, I will be working on several projects that will lead to an academic publication. Specifically, I will be working on domain-applications of Large Language Models to International Relations and Security fields, which is the topic I want to specialise in. It was, indeed, a perfect opportunity to learn more about these topics and also start building my academic resume.
Reflecting on your experiences so far, what would you say are the skills that you honed and/or gained during your internship?
As a Datalab intern, you basically work as a full-stack developer. HCSS dashboards are all built internally and, if you want, you can get really in-depth in their technical details. During my time here, I had the chance to tackle ETL, Data Processing, but also Machine Learning, EDA, up to user interaction and visualisation. I also explored DevOps a couple of times, and built an API. Nonetheless, I would say that most of the work in the Datalab is spent on quantitative research, visualisation and reporting, and if you wish to do so you can delve into the backend more.
For the research part, I had to learn how to navigate state-of-the-art research on Artificial Intelligence, especially on Computational Linguistics, and apply it to my work. Learning this saved me plenty of time in testing solutions, made me more efficient and improved the quality and the impact of my work. Finally, I discovered the numerous ways in which quantitative analysis can assist qualitative work, and delved into very technical projects that still have a high real-world immediate relevance. In general, I would say this experience has made me both a better coder and a better researcher.
What did you enjoy the most about your internship?
I haven’t mentioned this yet, but the environment. As someone with an engineering background and (currently) only a passion for security and IR, it is stimulating to work with and have around experts in these fields. It means that often you learn a lot during lunch and coffee breaks.
In the Datalab, we have moments every day in which we discuss projects, help each other out, share ideas on our whiteboard. It’s a very collaborative environment, and also a very fun one! Even if we often work on very different projects, you always feel you are part of a team, and this constant brainstorming is what really makes you learn and makes you find smart, innovative solutions.
This interview was conducted by HCSS Communications & Events Officer, Stephanie Govaerts
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