After quite a long semester of recruiting, I’m very excited to say that I’ll be joining Freenome as an intern over next summer! I had the opportunity to join a lot of cool companies, and I wish I could see what it’s like at every company, but sadly, that is not a possibility. I think having a wide range of diverse unique experiences is important especially in college, but sadly I cannot intern at every company. But Freenome is one diverse unique experience that I’m looking forward to adding to my list! Here are a couple of reasons why:
The mission. Freenome’s mission is to use artificial intelligence to detect early stage cancer. It’s a great cause that I am looking forward to contribute to, especially since cancer has touched so many people and their loved ones’ lives so anything that I can do to help out the cancer research field is worth it. I’ve always wanted to use computer science to make the world a better place concretely, and this seems like a great step in that direction.
It’s also a very unique application of artificial intelligence and machine learning. A lot of the buzz in this area now seems to be applied to autonomous vehicles, job automation, and virtual assistants (like Siri or Google Home in NLP), and biotech seems to be an unsaturated market for this new technology. Not to say that these other areas are useless or not cool in any way. They are awesome fields to be in. Autonomous vehicles will change the world, as around 40,000 lives are lost every year due to traffic accidents. Siri and Google Home already have impact in everyone’s lives as they make our lives much more easier. But I think that these are pretty “safe” bets these days. Most engineers can see that autonomous vehicles will change the world for the better, which is why it’s a very hot field to be in right now. But I think in my life right now, I’m willing to take more risks with lesser known applications like in cancer research.
The people. I had the opportunity to meet the engineering team at Freenome several times and I felt like I really vibed with them a lot. They seem like very dedicated people who are passionate about the mission. I want to be surrounded by people who love what they do, who are excited to come into work, and are willing to share their knowledge and discuss new ideas. I also had the opportunity to talk with one of the cofounders of Freenome and it was a very touching experience. Talking with Riley was one of the biggest factors that pushed me to join Freenome. Compared to even most startups, they put a lot of effort into their culture, which leads me into my next point…
The culture. Three of Freenome’s biggest core values are empathy, integrity, and trust. Which is something I definitely saw when talking with Riley and the questions he asked me. Having not only great engineers, but great engineers who are amazing people, is what leads companies to success. And I saw this from talking with Riley to talking with the head recruiter to talking with the engineering team. These values were shared throughout every individual I met in the company.
It’s an early stage startup. As a series A startup, there’s still a lot of work to be done. I know the work I do will be relevant, and I know I’ll have the opportunity to learn and contribute value to the company and stand out. It’s also very cool that the company is still small that there is not so much “ownership” of code or a certain area, but the work is spread throughout all of the engineers. I think it’s a very valuable skill(?) or knowledge to have that you understand a lot of the codebase at the beginning so that even as the company grows, you still have the foundation knowledge of the codebase and understand how everything interacts together. I know I’m not joining very early, but I think it will still be invaluable. Also, I believe that engineering is pretty similar across companies, but at a startup you also get exposure to everyone in the company across different fields like marketing. And at Freenome, that includes the biotech research labs as well!
I wrote about Freenome in my blog over the summer! It’s super cool to look back on a company I met during the summer and seeing it progress to where I am with them now.