How To Get A Summer Internship at DRDO — Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

Defense Research and Development Organization: Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, India, Bangalore. A mouthful, so let’s call it by its short form DRDO — CAIR. This one is a personal favorite of mine because when I was trying to apply here there were just 2 blog posts that I could find. It has been one of my mini objectives to write about it in the future. I hope this will help out :)

What does DRDO — CAIR do?

The Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics is a laboratory of the Defence Research & Development Organization. Located in Bangalore, Karnataka, involved in the Research & Development of high-quality secure communication, command, control, and intelligent systems. My project here was to use knowledge graphs to build a mapping of data points and use graph neural networks to understand these mappings. This is one of those cool moments where I get to say that I can tell you more about the project but I will have to kill you!

5 steps to apply for the internship

I did not apply only for DRDO at the time, DRDO was one of the institutions I wanted to apply for. I would encourage everyone to have a set of around 20–30 ambitious companies or labs they want to work for because the rate of getting accepted into any one of them is very less, especially for an undergraduate student. Other companies on my list were Microsoft Research, NVIDIA, and a lot of other data science-oriented companies. There were two acceptances I got one was for DRDO and the other was for a project at the Indian School of Business (IBS) in the finance-ML domain. The suggestions below are skewed toward research internships but you might be able to draw parallels between corporate and lab-based ones.

Checklist to strike off before we move to the main points:

1. Start building a good LinkedIn profile and keep yourself updated on it. LinkedIn will become a really good tool going ahead. Along with LinkedIn, I found AngelsList to be an amazing startup internship finder.
2. Make a list of about 20–50 companies and labs that you want to work for. It becomes easy if you have a google sheet with the lab’s name, email, and a 1 liner about the project. Though I personally slacked off on this.
3. Build your resume. You can have a look at mine here for some inspiration on the structure.
4. Download your transcripts from the college portal.
5. Have a template cover letter ready on why you want the role you are applying for.
6. Apply for the non-objection certificate from your HoD beforehand. Something that hurt me a little later during my internship hunting.

Now that we have the prerequisites out of the way we can look at how to apply to DRDO in particular.

1. DRDO has multiple labs, so first, choose one or two labs that you want to work in.
2. Visit the lab’s website and find for the contact us section. In there you will most likely find the email ID of the director. The email of the director of DRDO-CAIR is director.cair@gov.in.
3. Next, build the most amazing cover letter. Structure all cover letters in 4 parts. The first part should include a small description of you, your current degree, batch, college, and work area. The second section should talk quickly about the most interesting, current project you have worked on and draw parallels to the project you are applying for. The third section should be on what role you are interested in the company and how you can contribute. The last section should be a quick conclusion and a thank you note.
4. Attach your CV, transcript, and NOC letter to the email cover letter.
5. Send it across and hope for the best!

Once and hopefully accepted you will have the following steps to follow:

1. Your resume will be moved around in the organization and its various teams. Any team with a requirement and interest for you will get in touch.
2. One of the scientists from the lab will have 2–3 rounds of interviews and interactions with you. I felt it was the same as any corporate interview. A general resume round, a tech round, and an onboarding/HR round.
3. Once selected there are other formalities that one has to complete like the NDA signing, NOC form from your college, and police verification. After all the documents are in place you should get the offer letter!

Now, this is the exact route anyone will have to take whether it is applying for a thesis at Berkley or an SI at Google AI. There are going to be a lot of rejections along the way. I personally had around 30 rejections and only 3 reverted back, out of that I got 2. So head down and keep applying!

That’s all for this post. I hope that this post gives some structure to the summer internship application process. Happy reading!

Signing off,

Manish Patil