Summer Internship with IIT Madras — Shreyas from Sathyabama University

Wildcard Entry for: –  3rd August 2012

Name of the intern: –  Shreyas N Kutty

Institute: –  Sathyabama University

Organization interned with: –  IIT Madras

“Dude, enough with the hair styling, we wouldn’t want to be late on our first day now, would we?” Achyuth, my friend, screamed. Now this was our first day of internship at IIT-M. The dreamland of engineers in India. You study in IIT, you are God, at least according to your parents. Well, we weren’t bright enough to crack the JEE, but lady luck sure did a swoosh with her wand, might’ve wanted me to at least step into IIT, get a whiff of the air, and study well in the future.

Anyway, back on the topic, we were all set for our first internship. As we walked through the back gate, all I could see was forest. Thick greenery all around the neatly maintained roads. A bus stopped right at the entrance for the many people from various walks of life. Shabbily dressed vegetable sellers to neatly dressed professionals with their laptops. “Dude, bus? Or walk?” I glanced at my mobile, we’ve got time.

“Walk,” I said. As we walked, all I could see was the various kinds of signboards which made me feel that I was in some kind of wildlife sanctuary or something. We walked, and walked, and walked. Finally, I see a building. “Ocean technology department, that’s where my dad worked,” said Achyuth. Seemed kinda old; sensing my thoughts from my look, he said “Government college. Don’t expect fancy stuff.” I smiled. And we walked. “How much more to walk?”, I said, exhausted. He didn’t reply. And there it was. The block we’d seen on their website map. I was all the more excited. “Here we are,” he said. We walked up to the computer science department. All fancy names like IBM, Microsoft room caught my eye. The windows on these showed geeks staring at their laptops. I sure wouldn’t mind being called a geek if I was inside, you see. We walked to what seemed like a staff room.

“Sir, may I come in?” “Yeah! Come in, come in!” said a voice in a warm greeting. That was Professor Chandrashekar of Speech Recognition, or something; all I know is that he specializes in Speech Rrecognition and some kind of artificial intelligence. I glanced at the collection of books stacked near him. “Sir, we’ve been told to meet you by..” “Yes, I know,” he cut us short. “He told me everything,” We smiled. “So, let’s see, what can you guys do today…which year are you in?” he enquired. “First year, sir” we said. “First year? Oh…good good. So you’ve just written your exams and have come here for vacation. That’s nice. Since you both are first years, you wont really have much work here. You can learn. To us, you are kids. We will give you a platform to learn new things. ” he added. “So, what exactly have you learnt? You guys know Java? .Net and stuff?” he asked. “No sir. We’ve learnt C and C++,” we said.

“Okay, I have some books and reference materials on JAVA, would you like to learn Java?” he asked. “Yes sir! We sure would,” we said, unable to contain our excitement. No, we wouldn’t really be this excited if a teacher came into the class and said, “Kids, today we’re going learn Java!” No. Maybe it was the fact that we were learning Java from a Professor at the country’s topmost engineering college.

He also enlightened us with the fact that 80% of systems in IIT run on open source. He then called up a lab assistant and told him to “take good care” of us. He also pulled out two Java books from his rack and gave them to us and wished us luck. We thanked him, and moved over to the lab as per his directions. On reaching the lab, like any other guys who want to build their first impression, we walked in only to be told, “Remove your footwear outside the lab!” “Damn, what an impression,” I thought to myself. We hurriedly removed our shoes and entered. He told us to sit and we talked for a while. He asked about our college and stuff. He then asked whether we could understand Tamil, on receiving and affirmative, he seemed happier and relaxed and talked in Tamil.

We were then told to go the systems.  The CPU had some information stuck on it. It was the IP address, and the version of Linux running on it. Something that grabbed my attention was that he had named them. I got a system named “ELISAI” and Achyuth got “THENRAL”. It was kind of funny. He noticed it. He then told us that naming helps them identify the systems rather than having to remember their IP addresses. He told us to approach him any time we had a doubt. Saying this, he went inside his cabin. On the far corner of the otherwise empty lab, we noticed two heads looking at the computer screen and doing something. They seemed really happy. We later found out that they were M.Tech students. They were doing some project there. The whole campus was kinda empty since we had gone during vacations and this time IIT had a really long vacation.

Sitting there and working made me hungry. We decided to have lunch and waited till the lab in-charge went out at 12:30. He signalled to us that he would be back after lunch. As soon as he was out of the vicinity we darted out like hungry zombies. I had to make the choice between Tiffany’s and CCD for my lunch. I asked my friend which one was nearer to the place we were now, and he said that both were at equal distances. At CCD, I could have an ice cream with brownie for lunch, and yes, this could be my lunch since neither mine or his parents were going to know that we had had it. But then, my stomach said otherwise. We went to Tiffany’s and had naan and paneer butter masala. I did notice many foreigners take South Indian meals from there. I smirked at them for no good reason.

We went back at about 1:30. I still don’t know why we had rushed like that but my friend wanted to. It was more like we where in college and was late for Graphics period. We ran and ran and ran. The monkeys sitting high on the branches of the banyan trees where having fun watching us run. Finally we reached there. I noticed a sign outside one of the staff’s room. His room was next to the cafeteria. The sign read, “Hi there, standing next door you could get hot coffee, standing next to my door, you can get hot coffee thrown at your face.” It was more like dark humour to me.

We went in the lab and logged on to our systems. We finished about 5 experiments from the lab manual that sir had given us. At around 2:15 he returned. We worked, played and worked on till 4:00pm. At around 4:10 we got kind of bored since there was nothing much we could do apart from coding and playing games. So we wanted to go home and “get a life on Facebook”. We slowly shut down the systems and gathered the courage to go up to him and say, “Sir, we did about 7 programs from this lab manual. We need to revise a bit on the concepts of the other programs…” “Oh yeah, sure take your time. You can take it home. Do refer from the internet and all. You guys going now?” “Yes sir. We’ll be here tomorrow at around 9:30 sir. Is that okay?” we asked. “Yeah sure, that’s fine. See you tomorrow then.” He was happy that our day went well. We were happy that our day went well.

My first internship sure did teach me a lot. The people at IIT-M. Their lifestyle. Their interest in sharing and gaining knowledge. Be it the students or the teachers; if you want to learn, they will help you by any means. Nerds, geeks, psychos, you might think; but it is they who have they last laugh. The value of everything that we learnt from there was much more than any stipend which we would ever receive.

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