Internship at Carnegie Mellon University
One of the most essential and enriching parts of college life are internships. Regardless of whether it be a GSoC, a corporate, an industrial or a university internship, every student aims to complete at least one during their stint at college. During an intern, you get to interact with great minds, learn new things, gain practical experience, earn for the first time and garner a lot of new experiences. Today, I am going to share my experiences as an intern at Carnegie Mellon University in the field of Deep learning and it’s application.
I was very excited to visit the university campus which is a dreamland for a lot of robotics and machine learning enthusiasts. It was on the nightof May 4, when I landed in Pittsburgh, this was my first ever experience of travelling abroad alone. The excitement of a new beginning made it easy to cope with the change, from the scorching heat of India to the cold weather in Pennsylvania. The first thing I did the following morning was to visit the campus of CMU. It was quite different than the college campuses we are used to seeing, spread across a vast area it had no specific boundaries and was inextricably intertwined with the city. What added to its grandeur was that while discovering the campus I came across everything from the Robotics Institute to a well-maintained baseball ground followed by an Art School.
Moving onto my first day at work, I was allotted a project which was for a beer bottle recycling plant in Thailand. This was the first time when my work would directly be used in the industry. But coming to the more exciting part, I was given an Alienware CPU with one 1080 Ti GPU, 64 GB RAM and Intel i7, 7th generation processor for my work. For a deep learning enthusiast like me, it could not get any better than this, or so I thought. I started the project from scratch and completed all the tasks like data acquisition, data exploration, data cleaning and then finally designing an appropriate neural network to get good accuracy.
I got a lot of practical experience while working on this project, but this was not the only thing I learnt in my lab. There were 9 PhD’s in my lab and each one of them had their own expertise and abundant experience. Being around them I gained a lot of knowledge about the current topics of interest in research and different career options that lay ahead of me. It also taught me different perspectives with which I could approach new problems. Apart from this, there were bi-weekly talks where one of the PhDs would give a talk on his/her work and most importantly provide an intuition of how things worked out in their paper. After experiencing such a work culture, I realised the crucial role that PhD’s can play in a lab by being approachable and giving apt guidance. This way you are not working alone and believe me, it’s great to have the help of such experienced experts.
Coming back to my work, getting the help I needed had made me ahead of the deadline on my project and seeing this one of the Post-Doc asked me to join his research project and I happily agreed. Thus I started working on a relatively new topic of Domain adaptive object detection. With this new project came another surprise when I got access to my Post-Doc’s server which had 8 GPUs, 720 GB RAM and 48 cores. This abundance of resources was another great thing because here the computation power never became a bottleneck. I usually used to stay till late in the evenings because I had to handle two projects at the same time, but it was enjoyable. And the snacks in the lab never made me feel hungry while working late in the night.
Talking about the most important person in the lab, my professor was a very enthusiastic person. He used to come to the lab regularly to interact with us and get updates on the various projects. He used to make sure that the environment in the lab was a good blend of work and fun by taking us on treats or celebrating birthdays of lab members by bringing the cake himself. I must say that the work culture which you experience here is worth a try and it always adds values to your learning.
But going to a University internship abroad is not just about experiencing new work culture or getting research experience. It also gives you an opportunity to make all the arrangments of your stay on your own. A chance to handle all personal logistics by yourself after reaching there.
A good amount of my time went into deciding what to eat in the day, what things I need to bring from the supermarket, how should I spend my money so that I don’t become broke between pay-checks. But all this only made me more independent, and it gave me a flavour of life after college.
But if it seems that all was golden then I must share that sometimes staying there got boring. When we are here in our college, we have a habit of interacting with a lot of people daily which is not usually the case there. So what I realised soon enough was that you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone and socialise as much as you can. So, I used to go to weekly workshops and programmes organised by the management. For example, I used to attend talks like one about how to write good SOPs which was taken by the admission committee head of CMU, or I used to have lunch with my colleagues. Other than that I also went to summer events which were held across the city, or sometimes on a treat with some alumni of my college.
So basically the moral of the story I feel is that learning from a University internship is not just limited to getting new knowledge but also exploring this different lifestyle and how you can fit into it. And last but not the least, it gives you a great chance to visit and explore a new country. And all in all this gives you a lot of new learning and new perspectives.
I hope this blog gives you some valuable insight when you go for your internship, about getting the most out of your experience . Feel free to contact me if you have any queries.