IIT DELHI – Shivangi Bithel

Internship Experience at IBM Research, Bangalore

Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.

Hi Everyone!!
I’m thrilled to share my journey as a summer intern at IBM Research Lab situated in Manyata Tech Park, Bengaluru. I joined this internship as an MS student at IIT Delhi. I have experienced academic research before but I found working in the industry on business-related research problems more satisfying. IBM builds the future of technology with its products and innovations and I was glad to be a part of the IBM family and add my contribution to driving the future of AI and Foundational Models.

I arrived in Bangalore on 7th May and was provided with a beautiful stay for the first 7 days. The accommodation was just a five min walk from the office. Right after the orientation on day one, the exciting moment arrived when I was allocated my very own MacBook Pro – I was thrilled and excited to start my work. I got an amazing seat with a beautiful view for the next 3 months. Every day from then I enjoyed the sky and a cup of coffee here.

The next day I started working on my problem statement, as it was a research internship, I got a list of papers to read and understand the literature. The internship experience was packed with all those activities that I got to do as an MS Research student. I was asked to prepare a video presentation of my research topic and write a blog describing the same. IBM also conducted a hackathon for the interns, and employees were assigned to us as mentors. I proposed a unique idea and won the first prize along with my teammates Shubhangi and Ananya.

It was a delight to celebrate my birthday during my internship with my new friends and colleagues. We had fun events like intern-o-duction where interns introduced each other in pairs. We also went on trips during our internship to Wonderla and Area 83 Resort. The experience was amazing. I enjoyed every bit of the trip. This internship was not just about work; it was about forging connections and creating lasting memories. We sang songs and played Antakshri, and Dumb Charades on our way. We also went clubbing one day at Nagvara Social to enjoy the good food and songs.

The internship experience was packed with fun social events like sports tournaments and mentor-mentee lunches. We went to Courtyard by Marriott for lunch and enjoyed our interactions with all the mentors. The last thing was the poster presentation. I presented my intern’s work as a scientific poster to all the IRL employees and seek their feedback. It was exactly like the poster presentation at SIGIR. I got amazing suggestions and advice to improve my work. It was the last day for many of the interns and we wore our IBM T-shirts for this photoshoot.

Overall I would say, it was an amazing learning experience for me. I made amazing connections and new friends here. Bangalore weather is always a plus. I got to learn all the aspects of industrial research from distinguished mentors. Reading papers, writing blogs, and making video and poster presentations, I experienced it all in this short 3 month’s time.

IIT Delhi Winter Admission Experience

Hello Guys!!

I applied for winter admission to IIT Delhi in December 2020.

Step 1

I got shortlisted for programming test. There were 5 questions which I had to solve in a time span of 3 hours. I was able to solve 2 out of 5 completely and got selected for next round of interview

Step 2

I was asked to fill a google form with the choice of area in which I want to apply for MS, the names of faculty under which I will be interested in working and their two recent research papers that interests me.

Step 3

My interview was on MS TEAMS and there were around 10 profs in the panel. Some were silent and just observing and 4-5 out of them asked me questions.

First question was the introduction.

Then from the google form that I filled they checked my interest and asked me in what fields I am interested in. I replied with NLP and IR. Then they stated asking me questions from NLP but I just started with NLP and had no answers to their questions. Then they asked me if I had prepared anything for the interview :P. I replied with Information Retrieval.

They then asked me few questions from IR like Precision, Recall, F-score, TF-IDF, etc. I studied IR at IIT Hyderabad and thus also did one course project in IR. I explained them my project on which I was working at that time. Then they started with the questions from DS Algo. They asked me to solve the famous 3 sum problem. I got nervous and could explain till the part of 2 sum only (which I did as part of my ADSA assignment again @IITH) and could not connect that to 3 sum at that time.

I took this interview very lightly as I was already doing MTech from IIT Hyd. and was not at all prepared. Just with the knowledge from my then subjects that I was studying as part of my coursework at Hyd I answered all the questions.

Anyway, I got emails from two professors who wanted to have one more round of interview. I prepared for this one and I again got questions from basic math (Differentiation), Data structures and Information Retrieval. I was able to answer most of them this time.

Result

Got Selected!!!
And I am now doing MS in Information Retrieval.

PS: As there were very few experiences from people taking winter admission, so I thought of sharing mine. I also appeared for same interview in June 2020, but could not crack it that time. One of the prof taking my interview remembered me from my last interview as I applied under same research area and with those same professors only. I will keep updating my site with more blogs if I find something new about winter admits in terms of timeline for events like internship and placements.

First Semester @IIT Hyderabad

Hey Guys!!

This blog is about my journey at IIT Hyderabad. I had a short stay of only one online semester but still managed to gather enough memories to cherish from this short stay.

My journey began in September when I joined CSE Department for their M.Tech. Program. I was a Research Assistant under Prof. Maunendra Desarkar.

As the semester was online, it was really difficult initially to study and understand the coursework. Completing and submitting assignments alone was another challenge. I was lucky to find some incredible friends which helped me a lot in making my stay easy and memorable. We never really met but we share a strong connection. It was a friendship built over the loneliness at home and longing to join the campus life.

No college is good without good friend and I found my friends over WhatsApp and Google Meet. It was really not easy to attend an online semester. Sitting for hours in front of laptop can make anyone go crazy but I found my happy moments that I would like to share…