My MITACS Experience (Part 1)
Background
I am currently a 3rd year engineering student studying Computer Science and Engineering at University of Calcutta, Technology Campus. I am mainly interested in Computer Vision and Machine Learning, specifically in Visual Computing and its applications. I am selected as a MITACS GRI 2022 Scholar and I will be interning at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax this summer. I thought to pen my experiences down so that this may help aspiring applicants in the future.
Overview
The MITACS Globalink Research Internship is an annual program jointly organized by MITACS (a nonprofit organization) and another partner institution in the applicant’s home country (the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) for Indians). This is a global scholarship and hence highly competitive since students from all over the world apply. Upon being selected, you get the opportunity to do research for 3 months at a Canadian University under a host professor of your choice. Needless to say, this can provide you with invaluable research exposure and significantly boost your resume.
You can find more info on their website.
Eligibility
College: For each country, there is a specific list of colleges from which you can apply (in some cases like in France, all universities are eligible).
GPA: For Indians, it is 80% overall (or around ~8.2). For other countries, the respective cutoffs are listed here.
The above two are the major ones. There are some other soft criteria as well (i.e; you have applied before to MITACS or not, final year undergrads can’t apply, etc.) but they are not much of a big deal.
How to Apply?
The Application period usually opens around late August (may vary a bit) every year. You need to open an account and start filling up the various details: your CV, upto 2 letters of recommendation and a statement of purpose. This year, they divided it up into 2 boxes (research statement and achievements) with a 100 word limit each so be very succinct about what you write. Needless to say, the earlier you start the better — a month before should be good enough. Avoid making changes at the last minute since the portal tends to behave weirdly during the last hours. Write your details and keep polishing them every day.
The biggest challenge of all is selecting the projects: MITACS provides you with the option to fill in a maximum of 7 different projects spread across at least 3 different provinces. There are 2000+ projects in the portal, so use the filters diligently.
Pro Tip: You may notice that the same professor may have multiple projects in the portal. You can keep more than 1 project of that professor on your list but consider this: if he/she thinks you are a good fit, then you will be selected anyway but if not, then you are not selected + you have wasted a valuable extra slot in which you could have kept someone else. Therefore, you have little to gain but a lot to lose in such a scenario especially if you are not confident enough that your interests perfectly align with that of the professor. Hence, try to spread out the project list as much as possible.
Selection
First, there is an initial screening round where all applicants are judged based on the documents (resume, SoP, etc in the portal) provided. There are three categories all applicants are divided into: Candidate Under Consideration (CUC), waitlisted or you can be filtered out in the first round itself. If you are CUC’ed, it means that now your profile has been forwarded by MITACS to the respective professors you had chosen to work with. Otherwise, you have to wait till the 2nd round to enter the matching pool. This period is a bit tense: you may notice some of your friends getting multiple interviews whereas you may not receive even a single interview. Don't panic, a lot of my friends were selected directly based on their profiles without any interview.
Offer
If you made it through in the first round itself then give yourself a pat on the back :) Otherwise, no need to worry as the offers are rolled out in two waves of the selection process. The results of the first wave come around December and the second usually around February (this may vary a bit from year to year). The award letters arrive around March and then the next stage of the process begins (logistics, visa, etc).
This will be hopefully enough to clear all your doubts regarding the application. This year (2022) only about 1k applicants were selected from all over the globe so feel proud of yourself if you make it.
Also, I will be writing my internship experience in Canada too, so keep an eye out for Part 2 as well.
Please feel free to connect with me on my Website/Twitter/Linkedin. Also, don't hesitate to leave comments or any questions you may have or for feedback :)
