This told essay is based on a conversation with Felix Wallis, 23, a research engineer from London who works for the Engineering Society. His educational background, internships, and employment have been verified by Business Insider. This piece has been edited for length and clarity.
It can be difficult to secure a job in the AI field through the traditional methods of writing cover letters, bulk applying to roles, and hoping for the best.
I thought it would be much easier to find a company I was really interested in and customize my approach by building or improving tools for that company and building relationships with senior people at the company.
Thanks to that strategy, I was able to land an AI internship while in college and eventually secure a full-time job as a research engineer at AI startup Artificial Societies, which I joined immediately after completing my graduate degree.
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My coding journey started with a Christmas present
When I was about 10 years old, my parents gave me a Raspberry Pi for Christmas. It came with Python preinstalled. That was the beginning of my coding journey.
My parents weren’t too keen on me playing computer games, but I really wanted to play games, so I decided to make my own. They supported that. I started with a small Python project, but eventually realized that Python was a terrible language for making games. Next, I tried some machine learning that I read about online.
What drove me was a desire to solve problems I faced as a student, such as how to share notes with other students. I learned everything from YouTube, the Q&A website for programmers Stack Overflow, and the wider internet.
I felt the AI hype was justified.
At high school in London, I was interested in both mathematics and politics, but I had no idea what I wanted to pursue as a career. I had a boring idea of working in finance or investment banking until I completed a combined social science and data science bachelor’s degree at University College London. It was the perfect course for me.
I joined UCL in 2021 and did as many internships as I could during the academic year, mainly in technology and AI. There was a lot of hype around AI and I felt it was justified. We were seeing new use cases emerging every day, and it seemed like an exciting time for young people to be able to participate in a boom like the dot-com era.
While I was in college, I came across a company called CoLoop that uses AI to synthesize research materials into PDFs. I was having trouble reading all the articles in the course and the summarization tool really solved my problem. I used it a lot.
When the user interface changed in 2022 and I didn’t like it, I wrote code to fix it and shared it on GitHub. I shared the post in the CoLoop Facebook group and the founders saw it. I ended up taking an internship that summer because I thought I had shown how much I cared about the product.
Felix Wallis, 23, works at Artificial Society. Provided by Felix Wallis
At CoLoop, I met fellow intern James He, a student at the University of Cambridge. We ultimately co-authored an academic paper in 2023 that was published in the British Journal of Psychology. In this paper, we investigated whether large groups of AI chatbots can imitate collective human behavior.
The idea that thousands of chatbots could form a community where they interact and communicate like humans formed the basis of Artificial Societies, a company James co-founded in 2024.
At the time, I was starting a one-year Master’s degree in Social Data Science at the University of Oxford. I spent about 10 weeks perfecting my 1,000-word application and didn’t apply for anything else.
In this course, you learned about natural language processing, quantitative text analysis, and applications of machine learning. All of this is essential to understanding how today’s AI products actually work. Once you understand the mechanism, you can find ways to improve it.
During my graduate studies, I kept in touch with James. After I graduated, he invited me to try out for his team. If that didn’t work out, I would apply for positions at other AI startups or larger companies like Mistral or Anthropic. In September, Artificial Society hired me as a research engineer, where I built AI models and supporting infrastructure to run simulations.
My advice: Find a startup you’re passionate about and show your interest.
My advice to other graduates looking for a job in the AI field is to focus on products you really like in the startup field. Everyone will say they want to work at OpenAI or Google, but if you can find a specific startup that you’re really interested in, it’s easier to express your interest.
You can show your enthusiasm by suggesting new features, building small tools for your product, or simply engaging with our user community. It might lead to an internship, as it did for me. Even if it doesn’t turn into a full-time job, you’ll meet like-minded people who may one day find a company and offer you a job.
You can’t fake your interest or passion. In my experience, proving that you have an interest and passion is the best way to get hired.
