ICE Intern Talk — IUSSTF-Viterbi Program

A guide to spending your next summer at Los Angeles, California. Hopefully.

Published in

The Sensors Blog

11 min readSep 6, 2020

Hey everyone, I’m Shashvat Jayakrishnan, hope you all are keeping safe! Let me tell you about my internship experience this summer and what went behind fetching it. I am currently doing my research internship remotely at the Centre for Advanced Manufacturing (CAM), University of Southern California, Viterbi School of Engineering under the guidance of Prof. Dr Satyandra K Gupta. I got this internship as part of the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum’s IUSSTF-Viterbi Program. I’ll quickly start off with what IUSSTF is, giving a brief outline about this program in particular, and then move on to glimpses of my internship experience. Finally concluding with the application process seasoned with some insights into my application.

What is IUSSTF?

IUSSTF, an acronym that stands for the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum, is the result of an agreement struck by both, the Governments of India and the United States of America in order to facilitate an exchange of research and technological experience. IUSSTF provides research grants, fellowships, and organizes several exchange programs and internships in order to promote collaboration between India and the USA on the science, technology, research and innovation fronts. The IUSSTF is jointly funded by both the governments.

What is the IUSSTF-Viterbi Program?

Among all the fellowships and internships facilitated by IUSSTF, like the commonly known ones such as S.N. Bose Scholarship or the Khorana Scholarship, IUSSTF-Viterbi program is also one such short-term internship program, wherein every year around fifteen Indian students majoring in the fields of Electrical Engineering, Electronics & Communication Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computational Sciences (or any other closely related field such as ICE, clearly) get to do a solid eight-week internship, typically from May-July, under the guidance of a Professor at the Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. The program covers two-way airfare, a decent stipend and health insurance (paid for from your stipend).

Specific to our curriculum at NIT Trichy, the program is open to third-year B.Tech students from CSE, ECE, EEE and ICE. It also mentions that first-year master’s students are eligible as well. However, that will have to be explored further on the website. As far as our college is concerned, until now, every year at most one or at times none have gotten this scholarship. Unless you guys can change that.

A snippet from the Program Brochure | Source: www.iusstf.org

The Internship Experience

Detour: A Bit About Myself

I’ll take a quick tour down memory lane here. I recall, it was the start of 2020, a new year, a new semester, just about nine of us were seated in the first honours class on Advanced Control System Design taught by Dr Ramakalyan Ayyagari, Professor, Dept. of ICE, NIT-T. That class was a special one in many ways, at least one of the reasons being, we met in an air-conditioned round-table conference room in Lyceum and not in ordinary lecture halls :P.

“What is it to control?” was the ice-breaker question Dr Ramakalyan asked, addressing the handful of us. Often such ingenuous questions come off as rhetorics. “To control is merely to invert, isn’t it? Changing the undesirable into desirable” he said, knitting our astray answers into meaning. That moment stays etched in my memory even now vividly. Somewhere at that point, a lot of it made so much sense suddenly, two and a half years of engineering and all the things I was into aside from academics, that I’d been questioning for so long, finally seemed to have an answer and some underlying purpose. Everything that I had done until then had seemed purposeless or rather amorphous, but then that simplistic idea of control, or rather the reflection of an inherent approach of breaking down complex concepts into consumable, controllable chunks through rudimentary perspectives lit my world. I am extremely passionate about control engineering and getting my mind-blown every day by a crazy new application of control systems has become almost a ritual now. I can go on about the subject but given the paucity of reading tolerance, I shall spare y’all for today.

A few more interests of mine (the relatable ones perhaps) are to sing, write, speak, lead and inspire. And I love cooking and eating food!

Back on track: The Internship Experience

As I mentioned earlier, I am doing my internship at the Center for Advanced Manufacturing, USC Viterbi under the guidance of Prof. Dr Satyandra K Gupta. My work is in the domain of robot base motion planning and end-effector position cum orientation control for a Mobile Manipulator, using optimal control (particularly nonlinear model-predictive control — NMPC) strategies. Basically, my job is to optimally control a car-like robot’s motion along with controlling the position cum orientation of a 6-DoF (six degrees of freedom) arm attached to the robot vehicle. Nowadays, especially, these mobile manipulators are being deployed in classrooms and public places for disinfectant spraying as a precautionary measure to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Mobile Manipulator | Source: cam.usc.edu

This remote internship experience was a whole new challenge that I did not anticipate. The key lesson I learnt was that, unlike a regular internship, the lack of human interaction has a lot of effect on the standard operating procedures of an internship. Here are a few points I could draw out after some rumination:

Your mentor or guide won’t know the amount of work you are putting in unless you inform them explicitly. I was habituated from my previous intern to call for interaction only when I have some results to show. Rest of the time, they’d see me working on something constantly and that was an indication to them about the amount of time I was putting in. But in the remote internship experience, be it how many ever hours one puts into the work, if one doesn’t report or update about the status of their work on a very regular basis to one’s mentor or guide, even without having solid results to speak about, it may come across as inactivity whatsoever. This was a hurdle I had to tackle when it came to the virtual experience.
Definitely, the virtual mode is not a replacement for the actual internship experience, especially for my project that involves a significant part dealing with actual hardware implementations, which couldn’t be fulfilled through the remote work. But, both my guide and mentor did their best to give me as close an experience to the actual one as possible. My mentor, Dr Pradeep Rajendran, a post-doc fellow at CAM was really cognizant of the situation I was in and he would have hour-long calls with me almost every week or sometimes even twice a week, perhaps to make up for the lack of physical presence. He would teach me certain concepts in control from scratch and we would discuss things beyond mere algorithms and theoretical concepts by venturing into the real-world applications and the use-cases of the same. This partly made up for the practical experience that was missing in this mode of the internship.
I managed to extend our relation a bit beyond the work as well, inquiring about the research landscape in Robotics and the jobs paradigm in the USA. He had a lot of insights to pour in that cleared several doubts that I’d had in mind regarding my higher studies options. Again, in a regular internship, one would often have such casual chats and candid conversations organically with the co-researchers and other scholars in the laboratory. But in the virtual mode, I had to go out of the way to strike such off-topic interactions.

One upside of the remote internship being, I am able to continue my work beyond the stipulated time of eight weeks as per the IUSSTF-Viterbi program. All I would say is, in case you get a chance to do a virtual internship against sitting idle, definitely grab it right away. However, a lot of effort and discipline has to come from your side to keep the work moving and keep progressing, and this part is definitely more challenging than a regular in-person internship.

The Much Awaited: Application Process

When I applied, the program application form rolled out by mid-August 2019 and the deadline for submitting it was November 15, 2019. The application form asked for a lot of basic details, educational background, academic record, grades, the field of study, etc.

NOTE: You need to provide your passport details as part of the application. Which involves, filling out the passport number and expiration date in given fields along with a scan of the first and last page of your passport. If you do not have a passport, please apply for one immediately.

Apart from the preliminary details and personal information, the application demands:

3 essays/write-ups/prompts with a word limit of 1000 words each.
2 LoRs to be submitted within one week of the application form deadline, i.e., if the application deadline were to be November 15, your LoRs must be sent to them on or before November 22. The application gives an option of uploading your LoRs yourself as part of the form or alternatively, has a provision to give the details of your referees so that they can send the recommendations themselves.
Transcripts
No Objection Certificate from the parent institution. They have a format that you need to share with the Academic section that gives you the NoC. The NoC must be on the parent institution’s letterhead and must be signed and stamped by the Dean Academic.
Passport Scan. First and the last page of the passport needs to be scanned.
Option to submit 2 additional documents where I handed in my Resume and second-year Internship Certificate. You can alternatively upload rank certificates or any other relevant documents that you deem fit will augment your chances at getting selected.

Essays/Write-ups: An Insight

The three write-ups as part of the application were:

Research interests and possible project ideas. List 2–3 faculty members you would be interested to work with. (Please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/summerinternship and Viterbi School faculty web-pages)
Research experience, technical background, other internships, courses, lab work, techniques exposed to and past lab experience.
Career goals and what you hope to gain from this experience.

For these essays, there wasn’t any fixed formula that I followed. Rather I did not have much guidance from anyone given the fact that a very few people in our college were recipients of this internship program. I had connected with a passed out senior-only after I got selected, so I do not know what is the best way to answer these write-up prompts. But here’s what I did:

Write-up #1: Research interests and possible project ideas. List 2–3 faculty members you would be interested to work with.

In this first write-up, I split my response into three segments.

In the first part, I spoke about my inclination towards research and how I developed a keen interest, in so and so the field of work, over the years. Here I went on to very briefly introduce my second-year research internship experience and spoke about what role it played in grooming my said interests.
In the second part, I delved into describing a certain research project that I was interested to pursue in the field of Robotics and I went on to describe that in as much detail as I could. I made sure that my response was to the point and not entangled in unnecessary jargon and redundancies. Be sure to convey your proposal/idea in a cogent and succinct manner.
In the last part, as asked in the prompt, I scoured the university website and looked at various professors working at Viterbi. They usually have a website (http://viterbi.usc.edu/summerinternship) that advertises all student project openings that one could scan through and pick out what interests them. However, I trailed an alternate route of exploring profiles of each of the professors working in the field that I was on the look-out for. I short-listed three professors and briefly spoke about what I liked about each of their works and what I wish to achieve working with them. Again, try to be very clear and concise.

Write-up #2: Research experience, technical background, other internships, courses, lab work, techniques exposed to and past lab experience.

The second write-up was pretty straight forward. Here I split the response into four segments:

Past internship experience. Wherein I went into specific details of the outcomes of my work and what I achieved and focusing less on the process that I followed. I am a believer of the fact that people are more interested to know about what you got out of the experience and what you accomplished rather than wanting to know about exactly what you did to achieve that. So my response was a reflection of that.
Projects. Here I spoke about a couple of projects I was doing or had done in college until then. Again, focusing more on the learning outcomes and skills I picked up as a result of them and focusing less on what I actually did in the project. Perhaps, you need to find the right balance for yourself between these two things in your response.
Technical Background. This was essentially an extensive list of my technical skills: soft skills, software knowledge and programming languages.
Coursework. Once again, this was a list of all relevant coursework I had completed, also mentioning the courses I will have completed before the start of my internship. Since I was applying for Robotics, some courses I listed were, Control System Design, Engineering Mechanics, Digital Signal Processing, Microprocessors and Microcontrollers, etc.

Write-up #3: Career goals and what you hope to gain from this experience.

This was a rather short response from my side comparatively. I wrote ambitiously about my broader goals and visions without getting into the nitty-gritties. I backed my goals and aspirations by building onto them through my past experiences, or as they say looking back and connecting the dots. I scattered a few instances from my life here and there and wrapped it all up with my expectations from this program, how it will enable me and what I can bring to the table.

With that, we come to the end of the application process as well as the end of my article. I hope you took away something more than you started off with.

I would be extremely happy to help any of you in case you have any doubts. You can connect with me on LinkedIn to reach out. Alternatively, you could drop a mail to me at shashvatjk@gmail.com or contact me at +91 94235 61287 regarding any queries.

All the best to you all! Go make us proud :”)