This blog/article is all about the experience of Mr. Punit Kumar, who is currently enrolled in a Textile Technology Fiber Engineering Program at IIT Delhi (Batch: 2019–2023). He pleasurably shared his research internship experience that he completed during the second year of his college with RECOOLS. Which other students might find relatable and use his experience and information shared as their advantage in their research internship career?

He joined as a research fellow at the University Of Oulu, Finland, and presently he’s exploring more options for his future.

Table of Contents -

1. Introduction and interests

2. Getting familiar with research internships

3. Dilemma faced during decision making

4. Application process

5. Getting shortlisted by Universities

6. Evaluation process

7. First internship and its experience

8. Learnings, experience, and advice for others

Tell us about yourself and your interests -

Being admitted to IIT Delhi itself feels fantastic. The first year was all about a sense of great energy and enthusiasm. I love playing Basketball and was the Vice-Captain of the Basketball Team of my hostel and joined the Hostel Sports Committee afterward. Besides that, I joined Rendezvous as a part-time marketing team head, exposing me to some great things.

Getting familiar with research internships -

Initially, in my first year of college (Second sem), when talking to a senior one day, I learned about research internships and how they are suitable for an excellent academic record. Getting introduced to the research world and acquiring so much information about research internships was stimulating for me, mainly because the respective research professors provide the research intern with all the funding and resources required so that the intern doesn’t face any issues while anticipating their arrival the workplace. Although, at that time, Covid-19 didn’t hit us, and I was highly motivated, which is why I thought of giving it a try.

The dilemma faced during decision making -

Never did I think that something so deadly like Covid-19 will happen. In the second year of college, covid hit, my friends and I were confused about applying. The dilemma was what will happen if we start cold mailing for the next 3–4 months and get the internship, and the covid situation doesn’t get better. As for research internships, we need to start applying six months before. In December every year, the official scholarships schemes are offered, and most of the professors from Europe hire a research intern based on the funding provided by the UN. Apart from that, the professors from the USA and Asia call the intern on their private funding.

Finally, applying for research internships and preparing a good application -

After coming out of the dilemma, I started applying for research internships in December 2020. Let’s do it, I said to one of my friends, and if we get the internships, it’ll be excellent, and if we don’t, we got nothing to lose. When I started researching, I became interested in nano-particle and nano-research and looked for research internship opportunities in related fields.

I was also conscious about being from a textile background; I am not left with many options. While selecting the intern, any professor asks about something related to their course, experience, and knowledge that I didn’t have much. Conversely, the CS students have a plus point here: they get one-semester extra l, which provides options to show to the professor.

Being a fresher, there weren’t many things to mention on my resume, so I looked out for my cover letter. No matter how good your resume is, the professor will only click on it if the cover letter is convincing. The cover letter is the central part of the application. It should neither be lengthy nor small. After mailing a few professors, I decided to work on my cover letter and make it to the point by dividing it into three parts

- Who I am and where I come from;

- What do I want from the professor;

- Why should the professor hire me.

The third part needs to be well-prepared, mentioning all the skills that I have. The skills I mentioned were from my previous courses, which I never realized would help me. I underestimated them, like working in labs in the first year and performing spectrophotometry. These skills seem easy, but some professor’s significant areas of expertise are these only. So I picked the unique abilities and experience from the courses I had performed and related to the professor’s research domain and listed them in my application.

I focused on personalized emailing instead of mass emailing. The first two paragraphs were the same for every professor and changed the third paragraph accordingly to the professor’s research domain. Most of the internships start during summers only, so one can mention that I will complete this particular course officially until the internship period starts. As of now, I have done it through youtube and Coursera. Talking about Coursera, it is a perfect platform to learn. IITD provides that. And, even if the professors expected me to know of a particular course, I completed that course through Coursera.

Talking about tech students, they don’t need to apply six months before as the Professors from CS-MNC hire at the last moment because all work is possible online. Many friends of mine applied last moment and got a reply from the professor within two days only. For the lab-related work, I would suggest starting applying by December only.

Getting shortlisted by Universities and finalized by one -

Finally, in the end, I got shortlisted from 4 Universities -

1. University of Sydney, Australia — canceled because the professor told that online work isn’t possible, your presence is essential in the lab, but because of covid the Australian airports were closed.

2. University of Luxembourg, UK — As the cases were serging in the UK, India banned flights from the UK, and it got canceled too.

3. Charles University, Czech Republic — There were some funding issues because of Covid.

4. The University Of Oulu, Finland — I got the internship offer letter after facing some complications.

Evaluation process from Professor’s side -

I got the confirmation for the internship in March 2021. Although, the major hindrance I faced in getting the right opportunity was all the logistics and constraints from my college, as they didn’t allow us to do an internship between the semester. Because of which I had to convince the Professor to shift the joining date of my internship a little forward. So, I started in May 2021 and completed it in June 2021.

The professor took two interviews. The first was to know why I wanted to go in-depth, why I want to pursue this, and also to check if my application mail was genuine or not. In the second interview, he asked about the insights related to the topic. I have noticed that no professor takes a hard-core kind of interview. All they ask about is the basic knowledge and what you have written in the application is actual or not because they know that you have just completed your first year of college, which they keep low expectations from you.

There were no time constraints from the professor’s side. He told me to continue the internship till the time I was comfortable. The other major thing he mentioned was that July is the month of vacation for the professors in Finland, so complete it before that. Considering the task, it wasn’t short, so it required more time, but I managed to complete it in two months, about which I feel happy. The professor was delighted about it, too, because of which the professor highlighted this point in my LOR that I was highly punctual and completed the given work in the mentioned time period.

About the first internship and its experience -

It was my first internship, and I was pretty nervous. There were three people associated with the lab — the Head professor, a Ph.D. Scholar, and me. The professor decided that we will keep meetings weekly, i.e., every Wednesday, which was a significant constraint, but we managed anyhow. The first day, I was pretty nervous about coping with such a high-profile professor because I never had a conversation with any professor at IIT. But, luckily this professor was so supportive.

My internship was about the “Alkali-Activated Technology” that exists for the last 20 years, but nobody has standardized it before. A country needs to qualify for some passing standards draft for this technology, and India passes all the standards mentioned. This technology replaces ordinary portland cement (OPC), and it is eco-friendly compared to portland cement in building material and construction work. India is the second-largest producer of cement in the world. And India alone contributes 7% of global cement because all the other countries are coming together and putting pressure on India to reduce the generation of CO2 during cement production.

The professor gained interest in technology because businesses in Finland imported raw materials from India. He was in a quest to understand India’s utilization of raw materials used in manufacturing cement. Then, after researching, we learned that the standard formation is still in the process for this in India. Then the Professor wanted me to explore the future possibilities and the present environment in this domain. So, I approached industries and took interviews with them to collect data. I also read journals about how technology works and took data from them. After combining all the data, I had to prepare a research paper. I connected weekly with the professor and used to tell him about all the tasks that I had performed.

In the start, I didn’t know how to approach things, approach people, and extract data but, then I finally learned a lot.

Significant learnings and overall experience -

Central learning I would say punctuality and responsibility because there were time and language barriers because of which I had to prepare each and everything meticulously before every meeting. The most important thing that I have learned from cold contacting professors in Europe is to avoid emailing them on weekends and holidays because they prefer not to work on weekends, unlike us.

I would have enjoyed this internship more if I got a chance to go there and work offline with the professor instead of doing it from my room. But, anyway, “you don’t always get what you desire.” Overall, it was a phenomenal experience in which I got a chance to develop many skills of mine like self-development, writing, communication, data extraction, knowledge, etc. The application analysis varied a lot. There were days when I sent 20 Applications a day and didn’t get a reply from even a single professor that made me feel heartbroken. On average, I can say that from 100 applications, I got responses of 25, and for these 25, there were only five who agreed or finalized my application. And of these 5, only one professor agreed to provide an online internship, unlike others who asked for funding. Therefore, keep trying!

Advice for others looking for research internships -

Firstly I would say that be clear in your mind what you want. Mass emailing helps but initially, try to apply in that domain only where you feel your interest exists. Many friends of mine started doing internships in ML but left it halfway because they didn’t have an interest in it, so there is no point in wasting time and energy doing such internships. Therefore, choose wisely according to your interest, and then only pursue it further.

Start applying from December only and do your research. No matter how much advice you get from your seniors, you won’t learn anything until you start doing it yourself. It’s a trial and error process in which you have to give your best shot again and again. Lastly, if you send 20 applications a day and don’t get their response, don’t get disappointed because “Hope Always Exists.” If you have already done sending 50 emails, remember that you are still leading the race.

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This blog/article is all about the experience of Mr. Aman Sinha, who completed his B.tech with integrated M.tech in Mathematics and Computing from IIT Dhanbad (Batch: 2015–2020). He pleasurably shared the experience of his research internship experience before and after his graduation with RECOOLS, which other students might find relatable, and use his experience and information shared as their advantage in their research internship career. He joined as a research engineer at ATILF, a French NLP (Natural Language Processing) Lab, after completing his degree and associated with the Université de Lorraine. This coming October, he’ll be starting his Ph.D. in the collaboration of Université de Lorraine and Institut de Cancérologie Strasbourg.

I started coding and building my skills, and while choosing a topic for my master’s thesis, I came across topics like machine learning and deep learning. Doing some preliminary courses intrigued my research interest.

Table of Contents -

Part — 1 All About RESEARCH INTERNSHIPS

i. Application For Internships

ⅱ. My First Internship

ⅲ. Corporate Opportunities In Research

ⅳ. Going Beyond NLP

ⅴ. About Foreign Internships And Securing One Through Cold Emailing

ⅵ. Choosing One Out Of Multiple Offers

Part — 2 Ph.D. Experience

ⅰ. Exploring Ph.D.

ii. Ph.D. From Europe vs. North America

iii. Corporate vs. Research Internships

iv. Experience In Networking With Colleagues

PART — 3 Learnings and Advice

i. Building of Good Connections With Professors And Learnings From Internships

ii. Advice For Those Aiming For Research Internships

PART — 1 All About Research Internships

Application for Internship

As advised by seniors, we started preparing CVs based on whether we’re applying for an academic or software development internship. Initially, we started by putting our 10th, 12th CGPA scores and the courses we had opted for, and the projects we completed till then.

Furthermore, we didn’t have many projects, so it is advised to include projects done in online courses. The machine learning course by Andrew NG had projects like house prediction, which helped. Additionally, one can add coding competitions/projects done in college.

Primarily, it depended on luck and the funding or resources the professors had to allocate, and on the other side, reaching out to them (via cold mailing), checking up on their replies, and following up helped a lot. While some denied and some were accepting master’s students, but only a few offered interviews, out of which I converted a few.

I applied via Internshala, wherein I got an interview call. The internship topic was around the development of a chatbot, how do we make a chatbot understand user queries. Along with technical preparation, I also tried interacting with their website chatbot beforehand. The interviewer was impressed, which made me get the opportunity to work with that startup, and I joined them next summer. It was my first internship in Delhi.

My First Internship

It was a good experience, and DishTV was the client for which this startup was working. Thus, we had to go to the Dish TV campus in Delhi, and the startup founder and co-founder also worked there for the whole internship period. This chatbot application of text processing comes into natural language processing, and I was intrigued by that.

Exploring more internships

I was looking for an academic research internship again next. One of my friends mentioned Dr. Radhika Mamidi, a professor at IIIT Hyderabad who worked on many exciting things such as sentiment analysis and opinion mining; my friend shared her profile with me and asked me if I was interested.

We had similar interests, which made me feel excited, and I mailed her a proposal for an internship under her guidance with my CV. She accepted my letter and invited me over the summer. The professor was very cool with me suggesting potential project topics. I proposed investigating the effect of machine translation on a sarcasm generating system to the professor, and she agreed to it. Afterward, there was an advanced national language processing summer school wherein I also mentored a team. Overall, it was an enriching experience that pushed my interest in the research domain rather than the software development domain.

During my stay at IIIT Hyderabad, I met a student from IIT Kanpur. He suggested that if you are interested in a specific field and your professors aren’t working in that area, you can contact professors from other institutes via mailing. Mailing professors is the primary method to approach professors from other universities. I would draft 10–20 mails in a day based on my research interests and send them according to their respective timezone to increase the chances of getting a response. Another option is contacting professors from your institute and looking to refer you to their contacts since they may have connections with research labs as they collaborate with them.

Corporate opportunities in research

After interning with a professor, I started to look for industrial experience but in the research domain and prioritized labs like Microsoft research, Google research, IBM research, etc. Also, while then, professors at IIT Dhanbad were not much working in machine learning and AI. Hereafter, I learned that these firms recruit at institutes where faculties have been collaborating in these domains. Thus, I approached these professors and then mailed researchers at IBM research labs, post which they took my interview and selected me, and there I realized that most of my colleagues came from a program called Blue internship offered by IBM.

Going Beyond Natural Language Processing

As I started with chatbots and going on to explore NLP was a great experience. One of my friends began working on computer vision from the start. Moreover, my master thesis is a combination of NLP and Computer Vision as I also wanted to try it; for the time being, I went deep into NLP, and later on, during my master thesis, I combined these 2.

About Foreign internships and securing one through cold emailing

During the 2nd and 3rd years, many of my friends went for MITACS internships in Canada. It required a CGPA >9 while mine was between 8–9; thus, I didn’t get selected. So, after that, I approached professors by cold emailing, and luckily, I got a call from a French university where I am currently working. They interviewed me and accepted me, but unfortunately, they had a shortage of funds, so they asked me to apply the following year.

After that, I applied again next year, and then I got accepted with a short interview process. Post that, I interned for nine months, and meanwhile, I also completed my master thesis. At the end of the internship opportunity, I got offered a Ph.D. position here. I also got to work as a research engineer on another exciting NLP project, and after that, I’ll be starting my Ph.D. in October 2021.

Choosing one out of multiple offers

For all the research internships where I applied, I looked at the profile of the professor before applying. I chose precise options as some used to clash with my course of study, so I declined. One professor from Germany replied that if I can come to Germany to do a master’s course there, they will be happy to accept me, but I would have to leave my course here. So, timing and course constraints were the major factors in deciding which internship to choose.

PART — 2 Ph.D. Experience

Determining whether to do a Ph.D. or not

I realized that corporate would not be a good fit for me, so I decided to go for research as I knew that with a Ph.D., I could join any research labs or stay in academia. Consequently, I chose not to focus much on the hiring companies coming on campus as none of them had a machine learning profile. To my surprise, a company named Quantiphi came to our campus and had a machine learning position, and I applied to that company, plus I didn’t have to prepare explicitly for it. The interviews, tests, etc., all went well, and I got placed there, and it was in Mumbai, so it was not a problem to go there, but I had to decide which option was better for me — To go to work in a company or do a Ph.D. My friends played an important role in determining this, and then I finally decided I won’t be joining the company; I would stay here and continue with my research.

Exploring Ph.D

The deal was after a 6-month internship, and based on my work, they will offer a Ph.D. position, and I got the Ph.D. offer. My professor suggested that I fill the forms as the administrative work might take more time because of COVID; meanwhile, I could explore more options if I wanted. I was clear, and therefore I didn’t look for many options in the USA as there is a lot of competition I was working on during my internship. We had been collaborating with Canceropole, cancer in AI, and machine learning for grad school admissions.

Present work

I would be working on NLP in the medical domain during my Ph.D., which is the same topic I research institute in France, with the idea of building an intelligent information retrieval for scientific recommendation and exploration purposes.

Ph.D. from Europe vs. the USA

The program duration differs at the two places as the USA has five years Ph.D. programs whereas, in Europe, they have a 3–4 years program. In Europe, one also has a better opportunity to propose the thesis topic during and after the application process; conversely, students apply for department programs in the USA.

For these reasons, I thought Europe was a better place for me to do my research, and I also got a call from a few universities. During the NLP internship, I had two supervisors with whom I worked, so I thought this would also be an excellent place to continue my Ph.D. I was also eager to work on medical data and see its application in the medical research community.

Corporate vs. Research internships

Data in the case of corporations involves very real-time things, whereas, in research internships, the data is already pre-existing. In companies, whatever you work on will likely be integrated in real-time, but this is not the case with academia.

In research internships, we are more inclined towards building and discovering something new. In industry, the individuals don’t feel much oriented towards making something new but bringing the tools. If someone has created this model, we could integrate it with our model and make it start to work better, so that is the additional output rather than just advancing the knowledge and growing the field.

Experience in networking with colleagues

The people whom I met during all of my internships were very down to Earth and helpful. Everyone is trying to learn something and working on some problem. Getting to know people from different research backgrounds is always very interesting.

During the IIITH internship, the professor introduced me to one of her Master’s students. He was working on some problems, and he had to do some data annotation and analysis, and he contacted me to see if I can help him with that, and just like that, some of the other interns also started helping him with that part.

During my internship at IBM Research, we had hackathons and football games where I got to know more people and about their work. These types of connections can indeed be helpful in various ways, such as learning from other experiences, career advice, etc.

PART — 3 Learnings and Advice

Building of good connections with professors and learnings from internships

I am still in contact with my previous supervisors from IIIT Hyderabad, IBM Research, which I have found very helpful both on a professional and personal note. Thereby, I learned from them not just during the internships but also till now. I feel these lifelong things would be less common on the corporate side. These were the two things that kind of pushed me towards the research area.

There are a lot of research problems that need to get solved in every domain. As I am interested in computational linguistics, I’m currently working on the Word Sense Disambiguation problem for the French language. The lab in which I am working is itself a French NLP laboratory. I was fascinated by the motivation of the lab team to work on the French language about its evolution from medieval times till now. In India, we also have several languages to be a promising direction for linguistic studies. People here work on various aspects of the language, such as historical evolution, discourse, resource annotation, and so on, and their approaches are interesting. Someone can learn from them how to approach specific problems in various ways. These types of experiences from internships can come in very handy on a long-term basis.

Advice for those aiming for research internships

In India, the theory is more prioritized, but it is not wrong. The theoretical part is also significant, but most of us overlook it. In research, persistence would be one important thing, and just like that, keep doing it.

To frame it better, I would say that “Until and unless you get your target, you keep working on that.” It would be helpful irrespective of the intermediate negative results. Growing in one’s good time means the processes are eventual, so it is nothing to worry about.

So how do we start? How do we apply to it? Everything has to start before coming to an end. Starting is essential and being consistent, that is important. I was lucky enough to have a few good friends to go back to rant about all the intermediate failures. Such a support system of friends or family can be beneficial during tough times.

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This blog/article is all about the experience of Mr. Rohit Agarwal, who completed his B.tech with integrated M.tech from IIT Dhanbad (Batch — 2015–2020), who pleasurably shared the experience of his research internship at NIBMG (National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kalyani), West Bengal with RECOOLS, which other students might find relatable and use his experience as their advantage with their whole research internship process.

A research internship is usually undertaken in the final or pre-final year of graduation or post-graduation. At the core of most research internships is a research project of your own. While working on it, you learn new scientific techniques, design experiments, analyze results, and formulate different hypotheses.

You work closely with a supervisor or a professor who guides you. As an intern, you attend lab meetings, symposiums, and classroom lectures. You will work closely with scientists and will get an opportunity to demonstrate your own scientific insight. Most science and research organizations offer internships as a form of work experience or partial fulfillment of the degree.

Getting acquainted with internships

I was enrolled in the 5-year B.tech with integrated M.tech in Mathematics and Computing at Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines) Dhanbad and heard about a research internship in junior year when my batchmates applied for Mitacs.

Application Process Being reluctant to the process of cold mailing random professors, a common practice followed by many students, I came to know about Mitacs and did my internship at NIBMG National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kalyani, West Bengal. It was a data science-based internship on genomic data.

Points to be considered while preparing an application:

• It consists of 1–3 letters of recommendation.
• Try to approach professors having rich research experience in your field of work.
• Make sure to interact with professors as they’ll give LORs easily then.
• If the professor is not acquainted with you, write a sample LOR consisting of interactions you’ve had in classes.
• Try to inculcate extracurricular activities and soft skills in your LOR, as these are invaluable skills.

Pre-Intern Preparation

Having no prior experience, one struggles a lot initially. Not having any project or internship experience, I learned about data science and R before the internship. Most of the professors who hire interns are looking for preliminary work in the field like research and analysis; thus, having research skills is a bonus for application, although lack of them won’t hold you back.

Working and Experiencing Firsthand

My internship was 8 weeks long; in the initial 2–3 weeks, I read extensively about “genomics data” on which the theory is based; apart from acquiring skills in machine learning; the Post Doctorates readily helped in learning and discussing the theory for research.

After this, data pre-processing was done to filter and analyze data that would be of utmost use in the research leading to the application of models based on statistics and conventional approaches to get the results.

The penultimate week was extensively based on writing the manuscript and documentation. Adding to my work, I learned the most about python and machine learning during my internship. The best part was the discussions with the Professor, as such interactions are not present in corporate internships. It’s an enlightening experience to have one-on-one interaction with professors regularly.

Learnings and Advice

This was my first internship, and advice for anyone going for an internship would keep their expectations low. Don’t stress out on the utility and future, rather enjoy the experience. Make sure to enjoy the work and learn the new subject.

This will enhance your interest in the field and clarify whether you want to work in academia or not, for your first internship helps you prepare for future opportunities.

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