My remote internship experience at IIIT Delhi
Like most students, this semester I too have discovered a new type of study and work experience after my university shut down due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Coming to the final year, I had to find an internship to fulfil my credit requirements. And I was fortunate to find an opportunity to intern at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology under the mentorship of one of the professors on a research project. My internship started off in January 2021 and will continue till June 2021, since I’m almost at the end of my internship I wanted to share my experience working remotely for the first time.
Apart from the semester credits, for students having the will and curiosity to conduct quality research, research internships at such institutes are a great way to acquire the experience, insights and continuous feedback.
My work at the internship included coding, analysis, research, communication or preparation of documents, presentations and spreadsheets can be well-suited for a work from home mode of internship. In my opinion almost any internship can be done in work from home manner, as long as we interns are receiving all kinds of necessary inputs in form of consistent guidance and feedback from our mentors which in my case was my professor at IIIT Delhi.
My Remote Internship Experience
In my last 4 years of college, I never thought I would sit down at my desk at home eating, drinking (Coffee I mean xD) and listening to music while working on my research work.
It was tough to adjust to the new kind of normal in the beginning but one advantage I had because of my introverted nature is that I felt comfortable working in my comfort zone. One key take away I got from doing this remote internship is that communication is the key to succeed at remote work, since there is no physical means to communicate with our teammates, we need to be able to completely and clearly communicate whatever is on our mind during the few meetings we have in the week.
In my case, we had meetings regularly with my mentor and one other teammate. We discussed weekly status in the beginning and later on I was given more responsibility so we had more regular meetings where I used to show them the progress through a code demo or slides after which my mentor and I used to discuss what more can be improved or the next tasks.
One of the primary tasks I was given was to read research papers…lots of them. During my college days I hardly read 3–4 small research papers, but here I read loads of papers which actually gave me a great insight about the current progress in our research area. And the next task included documenting all the analysis and reading I have done. Which actually taught me even the simplest of things like making informative slides and spreadsheets.
This internship has helped prepare me for graduate school, where I will be pursuing my master’s degree in computer science. This experience has really opened my mind to the depth of how a quality research work happens. And finally I consider myself lucky to have met and worked with wonderful people.
