Summer Internship at Carnegie Mellon University — Anit Kumar Sahu from IIT Kharagpur
Wildcard Entry for: – 4th August 2012
Name of the intern: – Anit Kumar Sahu
Institute: – IIT Kharagpur
Organization interned with: – Carnegie Mellon University
Given my inclination towards research, I always wanted to do a research internship. In my 3rd year I had offers from San Diego State University, US and from DAAD but had no choice as I had to go to Qualcomm India as per my institute rules. So from the beginning of my 4th year I had it in mind to be very selective about my options. So I applied for DAAD yet again and by January 1st week I had the confirmation to pursue my internship at Vodafone Chair, TU Dresden. It was only then that I came to know about the Summer Research Internship Program at Carnegie Mellon University at Internshala which happens to be one of my dream universities because of its awesome Signal Processing Group. I knew I had a chance with my GPA right up there (9.14!) and my B.Tech project which was already in line for a publication.
After applying I waited patiently for the good news. It was not until 18th February when I was just getting ready to go for a Friday night party that I saw a weird number calling on my phone beginning with +141; and as soon as I picked up the phone I found a CMU professor at the other end who was to be my guide and talked about the stipend and the work to be done there. He offered me a whopping $6000 for the 9 weeks. I just jumped in joy after the phone call.
I was going to work on Distributed Signal Processing. Before the internship my advisor from CMU sent me many a paper for me to study and get ready for the internship and all the visa procedures went smoothly. But the journey to USA and the first two days in there were indeed very patchy which included severe nose bleeding in Heathrow Airport and getting lost on the first night itself in the US and as if that was not enough I lost my I-94 on my first day in CMU. Thanks to a kind soul who found the I-94 for me and I was saved from getting deported or else the internship would ended even before it started.
Come the second week and I was raring to go. All the PhD students around me were very friendly and made me feel like I was home. My guide was extremely helpful as well and gave me a lot of freedom to choose my own research problem and the way I go about it. The weather in Pittsburgh suited me a lot, due to which I could easily put more than 12 hours a day at work. Apart from trips to Washington DC and Philadelphia I chose to work on the weekends as I was making really good progress and also because I had a 10 day vacation in Scotland on my way back to India.
Disaster struck on the 6th week though when I found a small error in my theoretical results which meant the work I had done from the 4th week onwards was totally nullified. My advisor encouraged me to go on with the work but I felt I could not get any significantly good results by the end as I had only 3 more weeks to go. But I doubled my efforts for the last 3 weeks and struck gold just by the end of the 7th week when my advisor and I both were quite elated and pleased with the results I had obtained. Further simulations vindicated my results and thus are in line for a paper in ICASSP 2013.
Meanwhile CMU was doing its bit to keep the fun part going, with a BBQ party and a baseball match at PNC Park where I got to see the teams from Pittsburgh and Houston compete. Just the last weekend before my departure I went to Washington DC where I witnessed a cyclone going through and a power failure which lasted for more than 7 days. A power failure in the US is indeed a very rare event which was frightening but it still turned out to be a memorable weekend with the amount of travelling I did. The last week started and I knew it was time to go. CMU was already like home, as if I had stayed in the place for years. My advisor took me out for lunch in the last week which turned out to be awesome as he offered me to join him for a PhD which was like icing on the cake and said that he really liked working with me, and that he would like to continue to work with me even after I went back to India.
Hence came Saturday and I left Pittsburgh with the feeling that all good things come to an end and with the promise that I would come back soon next year for a much longer time.
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