Dhruv – TU Braunschweig
My name is Dhruv Piyush Rambhia and I am a third-year undergraduate student from the department of CSE. I am from Mumbai and my interests broadly include sports and trekking. Academically, I am interested in the Systems side of CS, Finance and FinTech, history and current affairs. I didn’t have to search a lot for my internship because it was a PT Cell intern and the IAF for TUB had opened in October 2021 which I signed immediately. We were told there would be 3 profiles for the same under three different professors: Algorithms, Medical Imaging and Communications Technology. It is important to note here that all 3 profiles are totally orthogonal, once one is selected for a profile, your entire work-related communication is with that professor only, one doesn’t have the freedom to switch between profiles. Moreover all three profiles are from three different ‘departments’ of the university altogether.
I was enthusiastic to pursue this internship for several reasons. For one, it would be my time going out of India and that too living all alone as a student for 2 and a half months, which is novel in itself! Secondly, I was excited to pursue serious research for the first time and get a firsthand experience of how research is done by ‘researchers’. Thirdly, I was excited to build contacts with people in academia which would help me greatly in case I decided to pursue research or higher education in the future and TU Braunschweig had a history of housing some greats, one of them being Karl Freidrich Gauss himself!
The selection process was fairly straightforward. After the IAF was opened, a form was floated, that asked us about our profile preferences among the three profiles I mentioned above. After the form, shortlisted students (the shortlists were pretty compact, like for my profile, only 5 students were shortlisted) had their interviews and after the interviews, final selections were released. The criteria they used for shortlisting were, unfortunately (or fortunately?) mainly CPI and JEE ranks. It is kind of well known that for second-year uni interns, CPI is the major factor for shortlisting and to some extent, previous research experience. I thankfully had two small research projects on my resume which might have compensated for a relatively lower CPI. CPI was also the major criterion for profile selection since it was noticed for our and the year previous to ours that the students with the highest CPI got the Algorithms profile. The interview was very chill and nothing like any company interview. For the most part of the interview, the professor simply presented his slides and explained the projects. After that, for about 5 minutes, he asked me about the projects on my resume and after that, we had a casual conversation wherein he asked me where I was from, how I was finding IIT Bombay, what I did etc. It was a relaxing interview and there was no grilling. In the interview, they look for two points, both of them equally important:
Research interest: The professor gauges your reaction to the projects, how much interest you show, the kind of questions you ask as well as how much previous research experience you have
Communication skills: The most important part of this is English speaking skills. The professor later mentioned that having a good command of spoken English was absolutely essential after which general confidence, and conversational abilities are checked.
As such, there is nothing one has to prepare for these interviews other than cooking up good stories if you’ve lied on your resume 😛
After the selection process, we started receiving emails from Prof. Sandor, who was our main point of contact from there on along with his personal secretary Mrs Ute. We were expected to sort out flights and visas by ourselves but sir helped us immensely in all of this bureaucratic work. In particular, I had a lot of problems with my visa application (I got my visa in April!) during which sir helped a lot and at one point even used his contacts with the embassy to sort a few things out.
Fast forward to mid-May, all 8 of us interns had reached Germany and had our first offline interaction with our professors. On going there, first of all, one has to finish a lot of bureaucratic work for enrollment but keeping in mind the well-known German efficiency and the support of Prof. Sandor, all of this was extremely smooth sailing. We were allotted our projects. For my project, I had no interaction directly with my professor. I worked under one of his PhD students. My project was about studying SiMoNe (Simulator for Mobile Networks), a proprietary software developed at TUB and extending it’s functionalities with new verticals such as 5G, Car-to-Car communication and Medical Devices. In particular I worked on studying the data traffic sent by wearable ECG devices, modelling them using statistical techniques and coding it up in Python. This was a high level overview of my project. The skills I developed during my internship were studying data traffic, understanding SiMoNe and statistical modelling.
Overall, I would not rate the quality or quantity of work I did during my internship very highly. I was frankly a little disappointed by the commitment showed by my PhD advisor. It was common for him to take holidays or go for conferences and for a long periods of time, I had no work to do because of logistic obstacles. Frequently, I went to ask for work or requested him to assign some other project which involved more work, but none of these demands were heeded. I never felt challenged by my work, it was pretty simple and I did not find it very interesting either. The quality of the work which was done wasn’t very high either. I feel this was my major issue with the internship; the lack of stimulating work and the lack of freedom to switch to better projects. I could not put across the importance of this internship and the limited time frame which I had to work to my advisor, something which held me back.
Other than work, the experience was something else totally, as mentioned living with friends in a foreign land for 2 and a half months is a magical experience! The weather in central Europe during the summer is extremely pleasant and we went tripping almost every weekend. We visited nearby countries like France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Czechia, Austria during the internship due to the ultra modern rail infrastructure there. Being young students, our trips were extra cheap and extra fun with friends and the freedom. During weekdays, we stayed in Braunschweig which is a really great city in itself. It is a quintessential small, old, historical European city. It had some amazing WW2 history and the surrounding area is great for lovers of European culture. We went for some really great treks in Germany and Switzerland during our internship as well, something which can be a treat for the ones who love the outdoors. We cooked our food ourselves by buying groceries from the supermarkets or with the food we brought from India. The people around us were young, cheerful and very helpful. The background of people was diverse and I made some really awesome friends from places like Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Singapore and Spain! During June and July, I even had the pleasure of playing football in their ground, go cycling around the city and outside, go for walks and make friends with the people I met in parks etc. All in all, Braunschweig was a great place to live in and life was pretty comfortable in itself.
However, it is important to mention the challenges that we faced as well during our stay. One challenge which we vegetarian interns faced was the lack of good, cheap, vegetarian food. The second major issue was that we had to live very frugally. Generally, universities give just enough for students to manage their food, accommodation and travel. However, due to sky-high inflation, this stipend meant that we had to be very, very ‘economical’ with our expenses. The food prices may come as a shock for people who are used to seeing prices in rupees. The high price of mobile data meant that we couldn’t enjoy the Jio life there :(. The last issue I would like to mention is the language barrier. Most students and people in the University spoke fluent English; but it must be noted that German was the lingua franca (obviously!). People spoke to each other in German all the time and many, many people we interacted with in our day-to-day lives couldn’t speak English. In such cases, it is important to be respectful and try to communicate via other means, but it is manageable.
To my juniors, I would ask you to focus on maintaining a high CPI and grabbing opportunities to take research projects in order to land a good uni intern. At the same time, one should be choosy while taking a uni intern. I did not do enough research about my project, due to which I ended up working on a project I did not like, so I would suggest my juniors to do maximum research and totally understand the inside-out of their project. It is fine to skip an intern even if it is in a top-notch university or something else is really attractive about it, because the choice of project should be your primary factor while choosing. To make the most of the opportunity once you land your internship to communicate a lot with your advisor. One should have regular meetings and be frank with one’s advisor about the progress of the project. One should understand the research philosophy and be patient, not expecting instant results, the kind we problem-solvers are used to. At the same time, one should make the most of their research opportunity by networking with various people they see around in the university. It not only helps to build amazing social skills, but exposes you to some of the smartest scholars from various fields, helps you to build your network and can also get you a great new friend!
