Chapter 4, Musings of an internship applicant, Where to apply?

Chapter 4,  Musings of an internship applicant, Where to apply?

Enough of guidelines to prepare yourself before you click on the “send” button of your mailbox. So… you have completed with all your routine works or rather your homework to boost up your eligibility and capability as a potential applicant. But whom would you send your application to? Here comes the tragedy of the multimillion search results. As you go through the search results, you will find most of the internships as they call sometimes, as “summer-schools”, and you have to pay a whole lot of money to attend them which are basically worthless as per your intentions are concerned. Another kind of thing which you can find, that they are recruiting people for a long period, say for 1 year or so, which again will not serve your purpose. Thus you have to keep on filtering the search results and refine your search again and again. The process is extremely cumbersome is requires a lot of patience and searching skills. My job here is make your task as easier as I can, so I will suggest you some technical methods following which you can tame your search domain reasonably well and have full control over the search results.

Maintain a hierarchical database of your search results in separate folders. What I am trying to say can be better explained by the following figure: 

Each of the blocks represents a separate folder with, parent folders and subfolders as shown. This is a schematic diagram and you can incorporate more places to apply as you wish. This is an example to show you how you can organize properly, so that your time spent in searching are not wasted. In each of the target folder (leaf nodes), keep a file containing names of the persons of whom to apply, his mail id, webpage, research interests etc. Whenever you compose the mail intended for that person, you can once again see his research interests, browse through his cv and so on. This organization will save you a lot of time, as your search becomes much more localized.

Plan your search before beginning. For example, when you look for an opportunity at IIT Kharagpur, directly go to the respective departments homepage, check out those people whose research matches with your line of work. For companies, sometimes there are separate pages for internships, search for it. Also check whether they conduct any official summer internship program (for example, IIT Kanpur conducts SURGE, Summer Undergraduate Research Grant in Engineering) or student exchange program (MICTS, DAAD etc.).

Use Social networking sites, (Orkut / Facebook): These are indeed great tools which can help you to gather a lot of information, particularly from communities. You can also contact some of your seniors or fellow friends who have already done some sort of interns, to discuss and get ideas. If your senior is in some industry where you wish to apply for, you must talk to him before applying there. What more!! Best of luck and happy applying [ : D].

Saving a drop of oil

I have been driving for the last three years, and based on my experiences, I come out with 8 points, which I think can help you to save the precious car fuel.

1) Pump up your tyre regularly -

Keeping your tyre inflated is one of the easiest and most important things one can do to improve fuel economy. Saving petrol means saving money. If a range is recommended by the manufacturer, the higher pressure should be used to maximize fuel efficiency. Deflated tyres run hot and jeopardize safety. It will also cause the tyres to wear out prematurely, affect the vehicles adversely, and hurt the fuel economy by increasing the rolling resistance.

2) Drive at moderate speed -

Avoiding high speeds on open roads results in safer driving and better fuel economy. In highway driving, over 50% of the power produced by the engine is used to overcome aerodynamic drag. Drag and thus fuel consumption increases rapidly at speeds above 90km/h. On the average, a car uses about 15% more fuel at 100km/h, and 25% more fuel at 110km/h compared to when it is doing only 90km/h. However, this should not lead one to conclude that the lower the speed, the better the fuel economy – because it is not. The fuel consumption of an average car increases sharply at speeds below 50km/h.

3) Start up the car properly -

With today’s cars, it is not necessary to prime the engine first by pumping the accelerator pedal repeatedly.Do not crank the engine excessively. This only wastes fuel. When starting the engine, idle it no more than 30 seconds to warm it up. An engine will warm up faster on the road. However, avoid sudden acceleration before the engine has warmed up sufficiently.

4) Drive in high gear (overdrive)

The engine runs most efficiently between around 1,500 and 2,500 rpm. To maintain these low revs you should change up through the gears as soon as practical and before the revs reach 2500 rpm. For automatic transmission cars, you should always switch on your overdrive to help saving fuel. Overdrive will allow your engine to change gears at lower revs. It also puts your transmission into an “economy” mode and lets it engage the final “overdrive” gear when cruising to keep the rpms extra low, thereby increasing fuel economy.

5) Anticipate traffic ahead -

A driver can reduce fuel consumption by up to 10% by anticipating traffic conditions ahead and adjusting the speed accordingly, and avoiding tailgating and thus unnecessary braking and acceleration. Accelerations and decelerations waste fuel. Braking and abrupt stops can be minimized by not following too closely and slowing down gradually when approaching a red light. It takes up to six times as much fuel to move a car from a dead stop than it does for one moving at just a few km/h.

6) Avoid strong acceleration -

The fuel consumption remains at a minimum during steady driving at a moderate speed of about 90km/h. Keep in mind that every time the accelerator is hard pressed, the engine goes into a “fuel-enrichment” mode of operation that wastes fuel. The vehicle should always be gradually and smoothly accelerated. Using cruise control on highways can help maintain a constant speed and reduce fuel consumption.

7) Don’t let your engine idle -

Minimize fuel wasted in idling by stopping the engine whenever your car is stopped or held up for an extended period of time. Idling more than a minute consumes much more fuel than restarting the engine . By having the engine switched off, you will save more fuel than is lost from the burst of fuel involved in restarting the engine. The net increased wear and tear from this practice is negligible.

8) Use the air-conditioner sparingly -

Air conditioners can use about 10 per cent extra fuel when operating. However, at speeds of over 80 km/h, use of air conditioning is better for fuel economy than an open window.

Chapter 3, Musings of an internship applicant, writing your CV

Chapter 3, Musings of an internship applicant, writing your CV

 

  Hope you enjoyed the past posts. Today I will share my experiences with you about how to write your CV or resume for the required internship. Though I give you a disclaimer, that I am in no way to advice you about writing a resume but for the sake of completeness of the ‘musings’ I share some suggestions. You can get better tips from the internet and good newspapers.     
      At the outset, I tell you, the resume you write should be a sober one (not a multicolored poster), neat and clean, without any grammatical mistakes, with all paragraphs justified – but having the capability of convincing its reader. Use up to a maximum of two colors to write your resume. Always mention the date on which you are writing the resume. You write the heading like Curriculum Vitae of ABCD / Resume of ABCD and follow it by the date in next line like (dated DD/MM/YYYY). Do not worry about page limitations (as who opens your mail, reads your mail, opens your resume and starts reading it will at least once obviously scroll through the whole material as he must have at least some interest in you, but try within 5 pages maximum) – but do not write stories over there [: D]. One more thing that you need to do is go through the resume of the person (to whom you are applying, if possible) and see how he himself writes the resume, maybe he would prefer the resume in this format. Always be confident while making your resume, never leave out any point. Remember this is the only medium you can communicate your experience to the professor, otherwise nobody will take you out of the lot. Unless you claim that ‘I have done this’, they never know what you have done or what is your experience (no matter how many sleepless nights you spent in front of your monitor coding complex programs). So you have to approach people and state your eligibility as a candidate, it is your duty to convince them, it is not their duty to recruit you! But, beware, never exaggerate or write false statements (you would be rejected). Best of luck to all of you!

A frame of the resume can be as follows:

1> Name, Affiliation and Personal Information (Contacts, Address, email etc. )

2> Research Interests. (Must be in accordance with the subject of the intern)

3> Educational Details. (Chronologically backwards up to Secondary level)

4> Project Works (This is the place where you can convince the reader, by giving a brief, precise and interesting description of your work(s). Followed by each project work, state the publication index you have corresponding to that project. This index is the publication number you state in the publications list. As I told you earlier, the relevant publications make your claim for the project work you have done makes it more authentic, at least they cant claim that you are lying.)

5>  Publications. (write each of them in this format :

       [4] Ayon Chakraborty, Swarup Kumar Mitra and M.K. Naskar, An Efficient Hybrid Data Gathering Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks, in the proceedings of The Sixth International Conference on Distributed Computing and Internet Technology, ICDCIT'10 Bhubaneswar, India. (February, 2010).

Springer LNCS 5966, pp. 98-103
Online Link: Link )

6>      Special Achievements (if you are a ranker, if you achieved a rank in some competitive event (programming contests, robotics contests, paper presentation competition etc.)

7>     Internships

8>      Extracurricular Activities (Do not write absurd things here, try to keep them so that it could be of interest to your reader, may reflect you as a leader, you can manage many things together etc.)

9>     References (may include your project guide, internship guide, your HOD etc.)

Chapter 2, Musings of an internship applicant, sending your mail

Chapter 2, Musings of an internship applicant, sending your mail

After you have fine tuned your mental setup and confident to go ahead for an internship, you need to prepare several vital things for your application, viz., your resume and a cover letter, (plus a SOP/LOM, statement-of-purpose / letter-of-motivation) in some cases. This is the first step for your application – yet the most important and decisive factor for your success. I can tell you from my own experience, that your cover letter, that is the e-mail you send to the professor or whatever is much more important than your resume. At every stage you need to be alert and foresee the fate of your email. For the person, who reads your CV, must have to,

OPEN your mail. (Why should he bother to open it? He can simply delete it. Is the subject interesting?)

READ your mail. (Why should he feel like reading it? Is the style of writing very convincing?)

READ your CV, finally and hopefully.

Thus to reach step 3, you have to pass steps 1 and 2 successfully. I could share some general suggestions which I found on the net or from my seniors about writing these cover letters. Also give the subject of the email carefully, so that it is interesting to her (professor), concerning her exact research interests, say, “Efficient noise removal: Project Opportunities in Image Processing”.

Suggestions for the mail: Begin by a general salutation and state your intention at the outset. Rather than writing “Dear Sir”, write the name of the professor. Frame each line such that she bothers to read the next line and so on. You can also state 1-2 of her group’s publication which you have studied. (Write this near the place where you mentioned your area of interest). Don’t worry about (actually) reading publication right now, you can read it in case someone replies you positively [: P].The closer your mail matches with their research -- the better, thus a thorough study of their lab’s work profile is necessary. You can change your research interests accordingly according to the professor's interests. The email should be 9-10 line to a maximum of 14-15 lines, so that it fits in a screen, i.e., it should be such that at one glance she should be able to make out everything. Highlight with boldface or underline where you feel necessary, but do not use too many boldfaced or underlined characters, this will make the mail clumsy and dirty. Instead of describing your projects in detail in the email better give a direct link to your webpage or blog where you keep the details of the work you have done. Similarly is the case with publications, if any. Do not commit any grammatical mistakes in the email. Don’t mention any thing about money or funding in first mail, ask them for it only once they reply positively. And most important, do not use an extremely fancy email-id (for example, dragonballz_doomed@abc.com) to mail people, (if you think it’s fancy enough open a new account). Never use a Bcc or Cc while mailing professors. Use a single mail to communicate a single professor. It is better to send 10 “personalized” mails in a day (as mentioned below) than sending 200 mails. Apply to maximum 2 professors of same department in same college simultaneously. You can mail other professors of same department after a couple of days.

The 8’0 Clock Rule: What would you usually do if every morning you find your mailbox flooded with 100s of emails? (You tick most of them and send them to trash! Except a few ones that were really interesting). You don’t even bother to see the emails which are well below the inbox, but unread – generally you take a glance at the emails which top the inbox list. Remember, you are not the only one who is sending the email to that professor, may be hundreds across the globe. Thus ensuring that at least he is aware that you sent him an email is important. As they open their inboxes around 8-8:30 in the morning, thus make sure that your email reaches just then (I, mean this time should be the local time for that country, for Germany it is Indian local time – 4.5 hrs, which should be equal to 8:00AM), else they would be downtrodden by the huge traffic of mails [: (]. Do not email on Saturdays or Sundays, for the same reason.

Publications: Here, I could tell you that publication at reputed places (conferences) counts a great deal, and together it proves that your research works at your host institute are really authentic. Being undergraduate students, nobody should expect a paper at a top-rated conference or journal from you (so not any path breaking research), but medium rated conferences can serve you the purpose. I am a student of computer science, so can suggest students of related streams to publish at conferences, where proceedings are published by Springer LNCS (Lecture notes in Computer Science) or uploaded in the IEEE Explore – they guarantee at least a descent quality of your work. Do not publish in National Conferences or Open Access journals; they add very little credit to your work. For papers which are still not published but accepted, you can use them too.

Next, I will discuss about the strategies to search people whom to apply, that is how to search universities, or professors, which labs are they attached to and so on.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." -- Steve Jobs

Chapter 1, Musings of an internship applicant

A Google search on summer internships yields about 3.5 million results -- “about 3,430,000 for summer internships. (0.21 seconds)”! Cool nah? Google has done it for you in 0.21 seconds, but how many seconds (hope in billions [: (] ) do you need to check these multimillion search results and draw conclusions? You have so many options to choose from [: P] but you are still helpless. Each and every year so many students search for summer internships frantically but retrieving correct and useful information from this huge pool of search results is really a tedious and cumbersome task. Some of you are lucky enough and get good internship projects of your choice. Some may be luckier to get internships abroad (obviously with full funding; else has little meaning!). But many or most of the people end up unsuccessful attempts, wasting a whole lot of time and energy. Also, as many of you may feel, particularly if you don’t have an ‘IIT stamp’ to provide you much easier access, things get more challenging and tougher. But don’t get discouraged by my words as, primarily, I was too one of the victims of these multimillion Google-search results and wasted a whole lot of energy and time. But with time I gradually changed my strategies and adopted several techniques (or rather, rules), which I chalked out myself, that yielded me an international internship in Germany (not being an IIT-ian, which is important) plus an internship project at IIT Kharagpur. This is the very purpose of this article, where I would like to help you (or the common junta like me), and share my experiences in finding summer internships/projects. Today I will speak about “the famous five” or five important questions you need to ask yourself sincerely, before opting out for an internship.

The Famous Five –

1. Are you really dedicated to do an internship? How many minutes in a day do you spend in planning your internship or browsing through related web pages (in ratio to the other sites you browse through)?

2. How well organized are you? I mean, do you maintain a log of the information you already have and don’t waste time searching the same information over and over again, maybe unknowingly. Do you plan a what-to-do list before you start browsing for information or make random searches?

3. What is your potential? Always be true to yourself and honestly judge you potential, your CV, skills (your overall weight) before you apply for a particular internship. For example, applying for a summer intern at UCB or Caltech or Yahoo-Google-Microsoft requires guts! (once again, I speak of non-IIT-ians) or else it is a mere waste of time. (Are you conversant with the terms UCB or Caltech? If not go back to question 1 [: D]).

4. Is your goal of work fixed or diffused? That is, are you working in a specialized area of your studies (say, as a college project or term project) and want to work in a similar area in your internship project? It will be very helpful then to get an intern, as without any sort of experience don’t expect them to take you. You should be very pin-pointed – don’t say “I would like to do a summer intern in the field of Computer Science … blah blah … ” Rather it would be like “ … participate in your research project as a summer intern for working on the routing path optimization in ad-hoc networks … “ -- and your research should be ad-hoc networks at your own institution.

5. If you yourself were the recruiter, would you take yourself for the intern? This is perhaps the best way to determine how fit are you for the work. Imaging yourself in the position of the person reading your mail, CV etc, his interests and weight. How far you differ from his interests? What is the level of difference between the quality of your work and the research being done in their labs. Check his CV for getting an idea about these points. If your mind gives you an optimistic response you may be through.

  So you tested the famous fives on you? How do you feel now? If needed do some homework to prepare a smooth path for your internship applications. Someday later I will discuss about the particularities of applying and several home-made techniques which will make your work more efficient and save a lot of time.

 

“Time is free, but it's priceless.

You can't own it, but you can use it.

You can't keep it, but you can spend it.

Once you've lost it you can never get it back.”