Job shadowing, performing small tasks, learning from experts, and gaining practical experience. These are often what interns and externs expect to receive during their time at a company. But it's not often externs get to dedicate a significant amount of their precious time to their own work with experts available for suggestions and advice.
Thirteen Ph.D students and one post doc affiliated with the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute spent three months this summer working on their own projects and theses at IBM for the second year of the externship program. Externs, who are picked by PIs within the institute, stay near one of two IBM sites (Yorktown Heights in New York or Almaden Lab in San Jose, California) where they continue their research with IBM experts and mentors. They obtain the industry experience they need without having to delay graduation along with one-on-one contact.
"The details that I would be stuck in, I really got good insight from people on how to go around a problem and solve it," said post doc Vijaya Begum-Hudde. "Maybe if I did it myself it would take me maybe a couple of days, but I could just discuss with them and I would have the idea in an hour.”
Begum-Hudde's focus is on quantum defect embedding. Quantum computing is one of four thrusts the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute focuses on. The other three are hybrid cloud and AI, materials discovery, and sustainability. Each extern’s project or thesis has a focus within one of the thrusts. Yet even though they each have their own research, the ability to be on site with everyone from different fields and share ideas was beneficial.
“They made everything so free that you could speak with the people there. I was attending some of the group meetings,” said Begum-Hudde. “I could meet the other interns and externs, and it was good to share science with them. So not just working on science, but also listening to what other people were doing.”
For another extern, the experience was a continuation of his research from summer 2022. Ph.D. candidate Jinfeng Xiao was one of the original 16 students from last year’s inaugural externship. During both externships, his research focused on natural language processing. His work last year, which was related to named entity recognition, has already been published. This summer was spent on research related to relation extraction. Xiao explained he’s been fortunate to already experience several internships at research-based companies. A second year as an extern at IBM meant a closer look at what it would be like to work there.
“The IBM research experience is more for me to know what IBM is like. Learning what the industry is like, to learn the value of IBM, to learn how their people work, and of course to build connections with the people there. That’s more of the meaning [of the externship] for me,” said Xiao.
Xiao explained finding an internship at research institutes with name recognition can be difficult for some students, but an externship program such as this one can give them that much needed opportunity and experience.
“You do exactly the same thing as interns do,” said Xiao. “Because there’s a connection between the university and IBM, you don’t have an interview. You build connections with a professor [who picks you for the externship] and then you’re good to go.”
Xiao plans on graduating in 2024. He said several alumni from his research group were hired in research positions at companies like IBM, and he intends to pursue a career within the industry. It’s an option Begum-Hudde hadn’t considered until her externship, and she said she’s grateful to the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute for the opportunity.
“I’m a very academic based person. I really like research. I was pleasantly surprised how research conductive the environment is there,” she said. “It never felt like a corporate place, it was really a breeding ground for innovative ideas. And they just don’t say, it really felt like that. It changed my perspective about companies who are doing research.”