The Internship Experience at Perceptive Automata
This summer, Perceptive Automata had three interns join our team who are currently completing their PhDs in Neuroscience and Computer Science & Engineering. Over the course of the summer, it has been easy to see how valuable each intern has been in providing meaningful input and the impact their work is having on Perceptive Automata’s technology.
With the majority of our team working remotely, this year’s summer internship program looked a little different than previous years. While we were not able to have lunch together every day or participate in fun in-person outings, our interns got to know and connect with the broader team through virtual happy hours, journal clubs, coffee chats, and one-on-ones. Slack has also been very helpful in replicating the feeling of walking over to a colleague to ask them a question.
Our interns, Jim, Rose, and Kelly, answered a few questions about their internship experience at Perceptive Automata:
Jim Robinson-Bohnslav, Research Intern
What made you decide to intern at Perceptive Automata?
I am in the sixth year of my PhD, where I’ve spent a lot of time working individually on academic research projects. I wanted to intern at PA to work in a close-knit team who all have expertise that I could learn from. I also wanted to try working on practical problems that might help people in the real world, rather than academic research that might help people many years from now.
Was there anything in particular that you found interesting or rewarding about your internship this summer?
I most enjoyed working closely with the research team, and everyone more broadly at Perceptive Automata. Academic research is much more individual — usually, just my advisor and I know the details of what I’m working on. Here at PA, when I have a question, I can ask experts on the team. I can get useful feedback very quickly about the details of the code I’m writing or the project I’m working on. It’s very rewarding to feel that my efforts are contributing to the overall success of the organization.
What advice would you give fellow graduate students looking to pursue internships in neuroscience?
Grad school can feel very long, and you spend a lot of time making little progress. I’ve learned more in these few months at PA than in almost any other comparable time period during grad school. It’s a great learning experience even if you want to stay in academia.
To prepare for an internship, the most useful thing (of course) is to spend a lot of time reading and writing good code. A lot of neuro research code is messy and hacked together — take the time to comment and document! If you spend some time reading good, well-documented code, you can learn a ton. Pick your favorite open-source package and read it on GitHub. Finally, don’t use MATLAB. Learn Python.
Rose Vidal Mata, Machine Learning Intern
What made you decide to intern at Perceptive Automata?
I was really excited about the problems that Perceptive is trying to solve! It’s not a matter of only figuring out the components in a scene, but also the behavior of the actors in it.
Was there anything in particular that you found interesting or rewarding about your internship this summer?
When doing research sometimes it can be hard to picture your work in the “real world”. However, during my internship, I got to see so many of the methods and ideas I had used or heard of before applied to real-life problems.
What advice would you give graduate students looking to pursue internships in machine learning?
Since internships have a short duration the time you might get to learn about the project you will work on can be limited, which is why it is important to ask for guidance from others in the company you would be working on! They have already more exposure to it and can certainly guide you and make sure you make the most out of your time.
Kelly McGuire, Research Intern
What made you decide to intern at Perceptive Automata?
When I started my PhD, I made the decision to join a lab based on the great people and the immense opportunity to learn from them. The same was true for PA. My coworkers are wonderful and it was a great opportunity to learn from a group of exceedingly bright people what research looks like at an AI company.
Was there anything in particular that you found interesting or rewarding about your internship this summer?
I found it very rewarding to do analysis that had real-world consequences. One analysis I did impacted how and when we collect driving data — this is totally different from my experience in academic science. I have loved my PhD, but the work I have done rarely had immediate consequences on my peers and definitely moved a whole lot slower!
What advice would you give fellow graduate students looking to pursue internships in neuroscience?
Plant the seeds early. Don’t blindside your PI (the professor you work with) with the idea of an internship. While the mentality around “leaving academia” for tech research has been shifting, it is still not the norm for a systems neuroscientist to do an internship in tech during their PhD. If you want more computational training that should be clearly communicated throughout your PhD. If you are clear about that, then a tech internship won’t be such a surprise to your PI when the time comes.
Perceptive Automata looks forward to welcoming its new class of summer interns next year. Keep an eye out on our Careers page for 2021 internship opportunities.
