Internship, A gig that students prioritize more than a job during their college years. After all, an internship leads a student to better job opportunities. It is certainly not an easy task to land an internship, especially when it is a Research Internship. However, Research is not the most popular thing for Computer Science students now. For Example, In my bachelor's program. The student ratio who wants to pursue Research is 1 to 51. Thus, in this blog, I will highlight some suggestions on how to land a Research Internship or assistance profile.
How do I start with Research?
Well, there are many Research areas one can explore. But the principal skill of all is sticking to the basics or fundamentals of Computer Science. Once you have enough knowledge of foundations, then you can start trying out different Research areas. You can refer to one of my previous writing, "Research in Computer Science". You can take a topic and try it out for two weeks each. For example, reading papers, watching lectures on the Research area etc. Later on, you can decide what area is most intriguing and try to stick with it. Gain some knowledge in it, and the time will come when you will be ready to apply for internships.
NOTE: This is the way I would have done it if I could go back in time now. I ignored the foundations and then spent a lot of time mastering the basics.
Cold Mailing, a must-have skill.
Writing e-mails might seem a tedious task. However, it is the supreme skill that a student or an individual can learn.
Landing a Research position itself requires a lot of Research. Let's take it to step by step.
- Make a list of professors whose research areas concur with yours.
- Visit the University website and search for "CS faculty". There you can access professors' e-mails along with their Research areas. But that might not necessarily be the area professors might be working on.
- Therefore, visit the Google Scholar profile of the professor and find out about current projects from recent publications.
- Now, after reading some work of the professor, you can write an e-mail to the professor.
How can a student from a tier-3 College or University convince professors to accept them?
It does not matter. Nobody cares where you are coming from as long as you prove yourself and add value to the lab.
Have a will of stone!
Therefore, the question arises.
How to stand out among all the candidates?
I would like to quote Mr Naval Ravikant here and further explain it.
The only way to stand out is through Authenticity
It's quite simple to understand though. It depends on your will and motivation to learn. The professor does not care what extra-curricular you have done till now. Professors just care about what you are putting on the table. Writing that email is more like selling yourself and the technical skills required by the professor.
The best decision is to learn a lot about the professor's research and find insights into it. Then mail the report along with your ideas in it.
I believe that is all up to my knowledge. Good luck with your next or first Research internship.
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