I landed a full-time job in AI at 21. Here’s how I did it, and what I think made me stand out.

• During his final year of college, Hung Nguyen got an internship at a loan company that uses AI.
• He balanced the internship with his studies and a part-time receptionist job.
• Nguyen said he believes his strong work ethic was key to getting offered a full-time job in AI.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Hung Nguyen, 21, who is from Vietnam and based in Australia. He works for an AI-powered loan comparison company. His employment, education, and former internships have been verified by Business Insider. This piece has been edited for length and clarity.

When I did my three-month internship with LoanOptions.ai in Sydney, I didn’t do anyone’s photocopying or make tea and coffee. I worked on projects.

Managers complimented my work ethic on several occasions, which I demonstrated by being in the office on time every day and finishing everything I started. The hard work paid off and I was offered a full-time position as a policy analyst.

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I planned to leave Vietnam to study and work

I knew that I’d most likely study abroad, which my dad wanted and was common among students at my high school, and end up living in another country.

I saw that the SP Jain School of Global Management offered scholarships and had a campus in Sydney. As a developed country with lots of opportunities for work, Australia seemed like a good place to get an education.

In August 2022, at 18, I arrived in Sydney to start my bachelor’s degree in data science. It was really exciting, mostly because it was my first time outside Vietnam. But it took some getting used to. It was cold and raining in August, when it’s usually hot in Vietnam.

I was by myself, very far from home, but after about two weeks, I settled in. Getting a restaurant job helped; it boosted my confidence and allowed me to make enough money to pay my bills. I no longer had to ask my parents for money and, from then on, I knew I’d be OK on my own.

My first internship helped me find resources to teach myself to code

From the very beginning, I enjoyed the course, and data science was starting to become sexy in 2022. During the summer recess, I did a data science internship at a software development center.

The first year of my studies primarily focused on math and basic coding, so I wasn’t yet able to work on anything significant during the internship. But it was valuable to discover which resources I could use to study independently.

The machine learning course by Stanford computer scientist Andrew Ng was valuable and interesting, as was New York University professor Yann LeCun’s deep learning masterclass, both of which I found on YouTube.

Studying independently was hard work, but I enjoyed it, and it felt as fun as solving puzzles. I also knew this knowledge would make me more employable.

Later in my three-year undergraduate program, I really enjoyed learning about algorithms, machine learning, and deep learning. Thanks to being self-taught, I felt like I already knew a lot.

In my final year of college, I sent my CV to the placement officer at LoanOptions.ai, who organized an interview. The questions weren’t technical, but more about who I was and whether I’d fit with the company culture.

I got offered a three-month internship as a policy analyst, which I started during the December 2024 winter break, just before the second half of my final year.

Between January and April 2025, I juggled undergraduate studies, a part-time job as a hotel receptionist to pay my bills, and my internship with LoanOptions.ai. At one point, I was studying two days a week, doing the internship three days, and squeezing in shifts at the hotel.

It was tough at times, especially when I had assignments to submit. I remember having a final assignment due at the end of March, so I coded at the hotel, went back to work at the hotel reception, and checked on how my data was training two hours later.

I think my work ethic made me stand out

After a couple of weeks of reading the company’s documents and getting used to the tech stack at the start of the internship, I started my day-to-day duties, which involved analyzing the information in each lender’s policy and turning the logic in the policies into code.

I think a good work ethic was key to standing out in the internship. I didn’t work overtime or take unnecessary breaks, but I made sure to see tasks through. You can learn most things on the job, but managers can spot a good work ethic.

At the end of the internship, I didn’t know whether I’d be offered a full-time job. Toward the end, I asked my manager a few times if there would be an opportunity to absorb me into the team. He said it was dependent on the budget, so I waited.

In April this year, a month before I graduated, they offered me a full-time role as a policy analyst, allowing me to continue the work I did during my internship.

I think having a strong foundation in math and coding skills helped me land a job in AI straight out of college. Then you can explore machine-learning algorithms and combine them to build deep-learning neural networks.

I learned that university is a great time to start an internship. Each internship taught me something valuable: the first, in Vietnam, taught me what to learn. The second, with LoanOptions.ai, proved my ability to work and ultimately led to a job in AI.

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