About
I am an undergraduate student in the electrical department. By the end of last year, we had completed our third semester. At that time, I was involved in many club activities and had a lot on my plate, so I got a little delayed in starting mailing. I started mailing business schools because I wanted to try something in that field, which intrigued me. I also simultaneously mailed professors working in the field of machine learning. I started all of this around Jan-Feb.
Mailing
I sent most of my emails in the month of February and was ghosted by one professor, so I kept going to different professors’ webpage and continued mailing them. Regarding this, I’d like to give one piece of advice: filter out the professors carefully and mail those who have multiple research areas and have some publications over the last five years, as they’re more likely to hire interns. One of the professors responded positively, and then we had some online meetings for 2-3 weeks, after which he decided to offer me an internship.
CV and Cover letter
In this process of mailing, the IIT Delhi tag helped a lot, I prepared a general cover letter covering most of the areas I had studied and didn’t emphasise on any specific topic. I mentioned in my CV, all the different clubs and activities I participated in during my three semesters.
Experience at Internship
Regarding experience, my internship at Oxford was on Environmental engineering and Climate change, while the one at Stanford was on Accounting, Patent trading, insider trading and laws around them. The research areas in the two internships were completely different from what I had studied at IITD, but still, it was quite a fun experience.You get a lot of freedom, authority and power in research internships. They are quite different from the courses that you do here. While pursuing the remote internship, the professor at Stanford recommended research papers on patents, their trades and laws that governed their trading to me. Reading all these papers was fun as the topic interested me, and I was able to help him publish a research paper also on the same.
My interactions with both the professors were great and I got learn a lot. Even though I thought that two interns would be very hectic, in the end I was able to manage them as they were online.
Message to Readers
I’d say try to get an internship in the winter or summer, and if you don’t want to do that, then try learning some skills over the summer for the corporate internships in the 3rd-year over the summer. If you’re unsure what to do, try anything that interests you, explore new things, and make the best use of your time.
Interviewed by - Rajat Golechha