Hi fellow Redditors,
I’ll keep it brief. I need an internship by January and I’m up for everything and anything to do with computers in Tokyo. Here’s my background:
* I’m a data science student (resident) currently pursuing my studies in Tokyo under a scholarship.
* I have a bachelors and honors in I.T.
* I’m Australian
* In Australia I’ve worked as a university lecturer on data science, tutored high school students, and contributing to a credited scientific paper on machine learning.
* Currently, my Japanese language skills are at around N5 to N4 level, so they’re a work in progress.
I love Japan and want to stay here longer. My scholarship will keep paying for my living costs if I can find an internship (roughly about computers) in January that will ideally go for 6 months. However, its proving to be much harder than I thought, especially with limited Japanese. In the last 2 months of searching, I have had little to no response.
I’m open to any tips, suggestions, or leads you can provide. Whether it’s about finding internships, navigating the job market in Tokyo, or specific opportunities, your advice would be invaluable. Thanks in advance for your help!
2 comments
Update your LinkedIn and set location to Tokyo. Keep studying Japanese.
Does it have to be an internship, or will you consider completing your studies and getting a full-time job? If you apply for full-time jobs, the pool of positions available to you might increase.
As you might know, the typical “internship” here is like a 1-5 day extended office tour, whereas long term internships are extremely competitive and mostly reserved for students who are getting a job offer upon graduation. Since you can’t speak Japanese, only a microscopic percent of companies can even possibly hire you. Like, my company does hire non-Japanese speakers but only for highly experienced roles in specific, bilingual teams. 100% of our new grad hires are either native or fluent/bilingual (actually many are trilingual English/Chinese/Japanese).
With this in mind, you’re not getting much of a response here because there’s not much to say. I think you’ll have to basically beg for an internship from the people around you who could vouch for your work ethic, personality etc. I would even consider cold-messaging people on linkedin. Anything to get noticed. Applying “normally” will get you exactly nowhere unless you get extremely lucky. Realistically speaking there is just no reason to hire a fresh grad that doesn’t speak Japanese.