Interning at National University of Singapore — Parth Sheth
In this article, Parth Sheth, class of 2020, recounts his experience as a research intern at National University of Singapore in the summer of 2019.
Hi, I am Parth. I recently graduated from the ECE department, IITG. This article gives an overview of my pre-final year internship experience at the NeXT++ Lab, National University of Singapore. I hope someone looking to apply for a research internship or someone traveling to Singapore for an intern can take away a few points from this.
Towards the end of my 2nd year, I was somehow very sure that I want to attend graduate school after my BTech. I had no idea why and like many others, had no research experience, no plans for the summer, and no real idea regarding higher education too. This was not only important from the admission process point of view, but also for me personally, was necessary as it gave a good idea of whether research and higher studies was the right path for me. There are many great opportunities for research internships through programs like MITACS, DAAD, etc. I was not eligible for most such opportunities owing to the CPI cutoff and overall profile. So I decided to find an opportunity by directly sending emails to professors whose work I found interesting. Firstly shortlist professors based on your field of interest and location. Most of them generally clearly mention whether they accept summer interns on their websites. Some even provide links to university-specific summer programs that you should apply through instead of sending an email personally. For foreign internships, sending your initial emails before November end is ideal, considering the large number of applications they receive, the visa process as well as other formalities.
Since this is not a specific program, the process as I see it is mostly dependent on many things out of your control. But certain things that seem to help are sending customized emails to each professor on weekdays and at their working hours, being clear on what research work is being done by the professor or the lab and including how and why you think you can contribute to some specific ongoing work or general papers published by the lab, in the email. In my case, around 20% of my initial mails and 30% of the follow-up emails got responses, with 3 to 4 positives. After this, I had to write a research proposal on the topic I was interested in, out of a list that was provided to me. Alternatively, professors might take a short interview before selecting you for the internship. After two weeks I was given a formal invitation letter and the employment pass for my visa, and I was all set to go.
On my first day, I was introduced to my guide who was a postdoctoral candidate at NUS. He gave me a quick tour of the department and showed me my workplace in the I3 building of the NUS Enterprise, which is the hub for labs and start-ups to promote innovation and entrepreneurship at NUS. (Plus as a Star Trek fan, there is no way you can’t be excited to work in a place called Enterprise!)
I then met with the others at the NeXT++ lab who were all Ph.D. students working on separate projects, but were really helpful throughout my time there. My work for the internship was based on the problem of link prediction for graph neural networks and its robustness to adversarial attacks. It was applied in the field of privacy preservation of user nodes in a social network graph. I had no fixed timings and was given a lot of freedom in choosing the path for the research as well. I used to meet up with my guide twice a week and once in two weeks with the professor. The meetings would last for about 30 minutes, but I learned the most about research in general and got an intuition about what life in academia would be like because of them.
Singapore is quite expensive considering housing, food, and commute. But the stipend covers the housing and more, and there are many on-campus options for food that are very affordable. Apart from that, you will find great food options throughout the city. Singapore also has a huge Indian population and many Indian food options if that is what you are looking for. The city also has a convenient public transport system. My daily commute was a 30 mins bus journey and every bus has a live tracking on google maps. The summers in Singapore are very humid and hot, which as a Mumbaikar I am used to dealing with all year long. Singapore like many other countries has an IIT Alumni Association. Every summer they organize an event for all interns from IITs currently in Singapore. Meeting other interns is always helpful and I ended up visiting some cool spots in the city with some of them! The alumni also gave some real feedback on future career opportunities in Singapore and also were helpful for any other difficulties you may face during your stay there.
The entire experience of an internship in a foreign country in a new research area is far bigger than just the work you do there for those 2–3 months. It was a very memorable stay for me and I am sure it will be the same for those of you who decide to take the opportunity. Good Luck!
