Introduction
Summers 2016 found me interning at Purdue University in the United States. What began with resume and CV reviews, apping fundae and spamming Professors worldwide ended up as the best 9 weeks of my life.
2. Getting there
It started with apping. I was amongst the lucky ones, I only had to send around 40 emails before getting an affirmative reply. After some email correspondence with a graduate student, under whom I am interning, I got one of the most exciting emails ever. It’s easy to remember the dates as the first reply I got was on Diwali and the confirmation email with stipend information came the day after Christmas. Come second semester I was corresponding with the graduate student regarding the paperwork for Visa. Around this time an internship from Purdue University opened up via the PT Cell. This was a formal program called as PURE - Purdue Undergraduate Research Experience. However, this had only opened for Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering departments. When I told my professor about the program, the JAF opened up once again, this time exclusively for Chemical Engineering students, and I ended up being included in the program. This expedited my paperwork by leaps and bounds however my stipend ended up being reduced. The good thing was that now I was going with 10 other people from IIT Bombay, including my roommate!
3. The Project
The research group I joined specialises in Computational Biology, and the project I worked on was in personalised medicine. The problem was to estimate the dosage regimen of Vincristine, a paediatric chemotherapeutic drug, so as to minimise its side effects. The major side effects we were concerned with was Neuropathy. Purdue has a tie up with a hospital in Indianapolis which gave us patient data - the metabolite concentration in various patients with varying levels of Neuropathy, and based on that we were supposed to select the metabolites which were useful, a process known as feature selection in machine learning. I had been advised to take up a course on machine learning in my fourth semester however I had ended up dropping it because of too much course load. Hence after the first week was spent understanding the problem (and presenting on it, to my horror but more on that later) I spent reading up on machine learning. When I was finished I was given a test dataset, and I played with it implementing various machine learning algorithms. In the end, I wrote a program that can be applied to any dataset. The second part of my internship was more interesting, in the sense that we were doing original research. I got to see in live action how theorists work. We developed a pharmacokinetic model on Vincristine then analysed it to develop a dosage regimen. I should point out that all of the work I did was theoretical and involved coding in R, Python, Mathematica and MATLAB at various points of time. Courses I did in the second year like Numerical Analysis and Data Analysis were a huge help and so was Biology (BB 101). It was beautiful seeing the theory woking in real life, though admittedly from another theoretical point of view itself.
4. The Work Life
Arriving there I was pleasantly surprised when I came to know that I was to be allotted an office along with the other graduate students. This has been a point highlighted repeatedly in many of the internship diaries but the hours were pretty flexible and relaxed and as long as you were getting work done. I did miss many Mondays, left early to catch a bus to the airport on Fridays and ended up ‘working’ from home for one week when I mentioned I was reading up on Machine Learning, but as long as the work was getting done nobody minded. The research group I was part of consisted of 5 PhD candidates, a sophomore and myself. We did meet up every Friday in which one of the group members had to present his research work. That was what happened to me on my very first Friday and I was scared shitless!
5. Life in US
In my opinion the most important thing life in the US teaches is to be independent. There’s an initial shock period when you have to cook for yourself, clean up after yourself, go grocery shopping etc. This does shake up the routine one gets accustomed to in the hostels (and yep it’s pretty comfy when all you need to do is go to class) . This actually is a nice experience and helps one mature exponentially. Everyone has heard of the American dream and yes, it’s pretty much true. The pay is high and so are the standards of living. Initially when every price is still being converted in INR we tend to get stingy but in due course of time one does automatically adjust.
6. Travel
From the amazing Manhattan skyline to Niagara Falls to a boat ride in Chicago downtown to fireworks on the 4th of July there’s a lot to see in the US. There’s great intercity connectivity but the flight might be a bit expensive considering it’s the summers and people travel a lot. We did end up covering Chicago, Indianapolis, Boston, New York, Raleigh and Washington DC. West Lafayette does not have a commercial airport, which does pose a bit of a problem, as to take a flight out one has to either go to Chicago or Indianapolis, both a bus ride away. West Lafayette in itself is a small university town and there is not a lot to see there, and adding the fact that it was summer vacations the city seemed a bit boring, however one is mostly busy with the internship on the weekdays so it’s not much of a problem.
7. Takeaways
It does see, paradoxical but before this internship I was pretty dead set on going non-core. However this internship did give me a new and unique perspective and I did enjoy the work so much so as to seriously consider higher studies in Chemical Engineering. I would definitely recommend a research intern not only to test out one’s interests in the field but also for the amazing exposure it gives.
Go Boilers!!