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.”