(fourthie-2016-17)
Hi all,
I am Chinmay from Chemical Engineering Department. I have completed my second year and currently doing my internship at Mechanobiology Institute(MBI), National University of Singapore.
It’s been a memorable six weeks for me, staying in this wonderful country-city Singapore, following strict traffic rules every day, getting a first-hand exposure to research and to roam around this beautiful city. I will be giving you a brief overview about how I got this intern, work profile, and will also try to answer all your queries.
Application process:
Well, I have to admit that it is quite difficult for a sophomore to crack a good university intern. Only 2-3 university opened for chemical students through PT cell, but that was around late January.. I had already made my mind to do hard-core apping. Even though, my CPI was not that good, I had done a project in my freshie year summers, so I moved on, taking that topic as my baseline for apping. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to send a 500 mails, like it usually happens while apping. having sent out around 35 mails, I got 3-4 positive responses. The problems that you might face are:
1. Most of the time (75%), you will not get replies from the professor and you may have a saturation point. So, patience is very important.
2. About 15% of the time, you will receive a reply from the professor. In my case, this was about 75% of the time. The professor can write you two types of mail.
A. ‘I am happy that you have shown interest in my research and I am glad that you want to also work in our lab. But, we have no vacancy this year. You can write to me next year.’
B. Straightaway a ‘No’.
3. About 10% of the time, you will get a positive reply. So, there are two scenarios here:
A. The professor will give you required funds to cover your travel and accommodation or can give you a monthly stipend. Even, if the stipend is less, you should surely go.
B. The professor doesn’t have any funds and so you have to cover your entire journey from travel, food to accommodation all by yourself. In this case, you can request the prof for partial funding. If you are able to gather the required funds and you think you can get the best research opportunity of your life, then you can think of going.
In my case, I received 3 positive replies from the Professor but had no funding. I had thought of funding myself as they were amongst the world’s best universities. Obviously, it proved to be too much funds to gather, and so had to ditch them. Luckily for me, I received a positive reply in mid-October from Mechanobiology Institute (MBI), National University of Singapore and were giving me a monthly stipend as well. My stipend was enough to cover my food and accommodation in Singapore. In Singapore, you need to have a TEP form which requires some documents to submit. My visa procedures were completed by early February.
My workplace!!!
The internship:
The labs here, where I got to work on various new inventories, are high-tech and provide a very good environment for research. My project was to study the regulatory pathways in Salmonella Typhimurium and role of silencing and anti-silencing of certain genes. I chose to do the experimental part, as it gives better vision and computational part becomes easy as well. Prior to this, I never had handled bio samples, so, it was a bit difficult for me initially. But, my guide was extremely helpful. She helped me practice simple lab methods like pipetting, test-tube labelling, sample labelling and so on. Once I was confident enough I started doing my experiments individually. Plus, she was from India so all the doubt-clearing stuff was very easy. Our lab had postgrads from India, Japan, Singapore and China. And, my PI was from US. All of them helped me clear my silly doubts. The lab had lots of interesting inventory which I was surprised to see at first. A black room and a -80 deg C fridge to name a few.
The scheduling of experiments decided our lab timings. But, I used to enjoy working in the lab, so I used to work from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Plus, we had usual lab meetings, where I got to know various new research that is being carried out. Safety was really important while working in a bio-chemical lab. Wearing a lab-coat, nitrile gloves, safety goggles was compulsory.