MITACS and Canadian Government sponsors an internship for Indian undergraduate students from prestigious universities under MITACS Globalink Program.
There are two categories: 1. Professor identified project
The professor gives a problem already and if your area of interest matches with that you can apply for it. The chances of publishing is more in this case (from my experience)
2. Student Identified project
The student based on his research experience should identify a problem and express his interest to work on it. The chances of publishing is quite low in this case because sometimes if the problem identified is not strong the student might get lost in research and end up with nothing. Only myself and one or two more guys from this category submitted papers in this category.
PROCEDURE
The procedure goes as follows:
1.Track the MITACS website for announcements about application dates. (Last time application submission closed on Dec 4)
2.You will have to submit resume, work plan,recommendations and transcripts with a list of preferred professors whom you would like to work with in Canada.
3.Then wait for intimation from MITACS team about your selection. (last time it came on Jan 20 I believe)
KEY POINTS
Your selection is independent of the professor list you give. So thoughts like if your preferred professor is busy you might not get selected are not necessary. MITACS eyes only on talent. If they don’t get your preferred rofessor they will automatically find you a professor.
You will be needing two recommendation letters. Try to get as much solid reco as possible.
As far as student identified project is considered, Work plan is vital. It gives them an idea of how clear you are about working on your problem there in a Canadian University. Hence kindly give special care for Work plan document.
Professor identified projects deadline will be seperate from student identified project deadline. Make note of it..!
Regarding choosing professors use these inputs:
1. Find profs relEvant to your field of interest 2. Try to find from their website/blog about their knowledge of MITACS GLOBALINK program and give priority to profs who know about the program
There is no need to mail profs and inform them that you are trying for internship through MITACS under him.
PLEASE LEAVE COMMENTS IN CASE OF ANY QUERIES. WILL GET BACK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE
As soon as one steps into his pre final year every student tries to strengthen his profile. Internships have always been one great savior for students in many ways. First they primarily help a student to test the waters in scientific research. Second it helps them to showcase their talent in proper directed way.
But it all depends on what you choose. An internship after third year is way different from something you might have done at the end in second year. Because third year summer hols provides solid time to prepare for placements andother challenging exams such as CAT,GRE,GMAT.Hence those who suffer terribly from megalomania in college days can take the step ahead.
Caution:
Internships drain both time and energy. They will mostly be occupying or else you are wasting someone’s resources or time. So plan before hand whether your career plan requires an internship or not.
Types:
One should definitely opt for an internship that would help him shape his profile according to his career plan. For that he has to try getting the right kind of internship.
1. Research intern
2. Corporate intern
3. Programming intern
Research Internships:
As the name states these are for people who want to test the waters in research. Some famous organisations that provide these internships abroad include DAAD – Germany MITACS GLOBALINK- Canada
DAAD is quite a difficult one to get because of severe competition from IITians. There are lot of intricacies involved. Like IIT professors have tie ups with universities in Germany and hence they directly accept IITians there. Plus all arrangements including stay and other organising has to be carried out by student himself. I am not sure about the sponsorship from DAAD.
Contacts: Vijay Venkatraman, Final Year, Mechanical
MITACS is quite open for Anna University. Last year three students including me applied for MITACS GLOBALINK program and got selected.MITACS is a fully sponsored program and regarded as the most organised internship program by IITians. It gives great exposure to research abroad and sets you the right platform. In turn turned to be the most valuable experience in my Undergraduate study.
Contacts:
Vidhoon Viswanathan (myself), Final year, IT
Swathi Meenakshi, Final year,EEE
Nagarajan, Final year, Manufacturing
Other means to get an internship abroad is to find profs who take intern students and apply manually. This is a very tiresome process indeed. Going through various professor profiles and finding the right one.. then mailing them without spams .. is quite challenging according to me and my seniors.
Contacts:
Naveen Somasundaram,2010 passout,IT
Ramakrishnan Durairajan, 2010 passout, IT
!!MOST IMPORTANT!!
People going for internships abroad should focus on trying to outwit the co-IITians in order to establish the name of CEG. Apart from all enjoyment fruitful results should be produced to achieve that goal.
Within India, there are abundant options and is not as much elusive as the above category.
IITM,
IITB,
IISC,
IITD,
IAS,Bangalore are some of the institutions that organise research internship programs with professor guidance and stipend.
Contacts:
Sanjeev Chandran, 2010 passout,CS
Jagdish, Final year,CS
Corporate Interships:
For people eyeing to get placed in great organisations and start their professional carreer head on, corporate internships are the best means to make contacts and prove what they are capable of. In case of corporate internship one should be keen in establishing a good conduct and relationship with the organisation so as to help convert it into a full time opportunity. Since Anna university has no internship term in their schedule all corporates that offer 6 month internships (includes big shots like amazon) are eliminated. Hence it is in turn very challenging to get an internship under branded organisation.
In our college Microsoft hires interns from third years and that seems to be the only option from the institutional side. All other opportunities depend on contacts with seniors and companies and stuff.. For more info on Microsoft intern see these:
My post of Microsoft Intern Naveen’s blog
Contacts: Naveen,Final year IT
Programming intern
This category of internship is meant to be done in second year summer hols. It is available in our college as well as under RTBI in IITM. It won’t involve research and may or may not have stipends. The goal might be something a little beyond a semester project that is unlikely to be dumped in dustbin after completion.
Contacts: Kannan Venkat, Final year, IT
So be wise in choosing internships and try to reason out the need to do one.
Best Wishes!!
Over 600 million passenger cars travel on the streets and roads around the world today.The average time spent by a person driving or riding is 2 hours and 52 minutes per day.The rate of growth of the passenger car population is projected between 3–6 percent in the coming years. All these statistics intensified the need for the development of Vehicular Networks, a means of communication and information sharing between the vehicles on the move.
When calculated, the significance of the data that can be gathered while a person is on the move is quite astonishing. And the effect of sharing this amount of data among the other vehicles around is mind blowing! The tides created by these effects push us towards the shore of inter-vehicular communications.
The very thought of sharing information on the move opens the door to a large pool of applications based on safety and business needs. You want to escape a traffic jam? You want to enjoy high-speed Internet on the move? You want to find a parking space just like that? If these questions erupt butterflies within your stomach then I have something to feed those butterflies. Those days are not far away! Let us examine different kinds of applications that arise from the roots of Vehicular Networks first.
One fine day, I am going on a highway and all of the sudden a car on opposite lane looses control and overturns. It would be helpful if I could call an ambulance while I concentrate on driving. It would be even better if I could tell the other vehicles to slow down in order to avoid a pile-up crash. This particular case gives rise to emergency message dissemination
applications.
Another fine day, I am going by car to airport in order to catch a flight for Toronto. But due to the heavy traffic it seems that I would likely miss my scheduled flight. It would be great if I was able to reschedule my trip by connecting to the Internet on the move. It would be very helpful if I get to know the density of the traffic along each possible route to my destination, so that we can choose the best path. This scenario leads to the category of smart traveler services and traffic information services.
Now having a clear idea of the scope and the diverse range of applications that branch out of Vehicular Networks, let us move onto some other important aspects of this promising field of sciences and engineering. Vehiclular Netowrks are rapidly dynamic in nature.
Hence we bring them under the ad-hoc class and label them as “Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks”—VANETS.
With the safety and comfort comes a cost! Yes, VANETS would require great expenditures if implemented as an independent infrastructure. But the existing Internet infrastructure can be very well used to overlay the infrastructure needed for VANETS. Scientists and engineers have continuously toiled to reduce the infrastructure requirements so as to minimize the time and cost required to realize the technology. This has been one of the prime research focuses of Dr. Jianping Pan and his vehicular networks group at the Protocols for Advanced networking Lab (PANLAB), University of Victoria (UVIC),and the research community has made significant contributions in the past few years towards the VANET technology. I have been a part of the vehicular networks group during my MITACS GLOBALINK’10 internship at UVIC and created simulations of real world scenarios to analyze the protocols developed at the laboratory. It would help in better understanding the performance of the protocol and modeling it more accurately, suited to the real world scenarios. Simualtions help protocol designers and researchers by providing different situations due to the variations in traffic load and condition and several other factors while the protocol is being simulated and evaluated.
During my technical presentation session
In an attempt to use the existing infrastructure, we preferred connecting several VANETS at different places to propogate information using wired access points infrastructure. My project involves the analysis of the availability of an access point for vehicles to upload their information. It includes the estimation of parameters such as wireless transmission probability and communication collision probability. This study would result in the complete analysis of positioning and distribution of access points across a region. This would be vital in determining the infrastructure cost and ease the cost-benefit analysis.
MITACS has played a vital role in my research by bringing me to the right place for doing the research in my field of interest with experienced researchers and professors of the field. Added to that they have exposed us to valuable experiences during the industrial engagement week and also created the awareness on the various oppurtunities that are open in this land of enormous oppurtunities. Above all, the nature, beauty, weather and stunning scenery that Canada has offered to us deserve special mention.
Swiff came my 20th birthday after my return from Canada and placement drama, amidst my GRE preparation 🙂 !! Can’t imagine the speed at which a month drifted between these events…
I turned 20 today on a fun filled day full of surprises and rejoices! I feel all the events that happened throughout the day deserves mention due to the amount of effort and commotion involved!! 🙂
Morning 6 30 am
“Ding dong!” I hear my house door bell ring while I was half asleep in my room. As every lazy lad does I ignored it and drifted into my own comfort zone again… “Ding dong!!” ,again it rang..!! When I was about to rise my dad went to open the door and was startled on seeing KVK and SHM at the door.. They were already there early in the morning to wish me on my birthday…
They rushed me to get ready and leave to Bezze beach with them. Without hesitation while my sub consious mind continuously battled for traces of their plan I swiftly dressed up to leave with them. I was expecting all others of my gang to be out there in the beach waiting to surprise me…!
Morning 7 am
We all reached Bezzie beach and walked to the tides struggling through the sands. Though I constantly share things with Bezzie beach I have neva been there that early in the morning.Spent sometime in the morning freshness along with KVK and SHM taking pics and playing with the brackish water. Sometime later KVK took me for a walk along the shore and we spent sometime sitting on the banks raised with sand…
Sand wish! 🙂
When we came back SHM was already with a ‘kuti’ cake perfectly large for three stomachs to assimilate. We had a sweet cake cutting and “smearing on my face” or “face cake painting” ceremony or whatever you want to call ceremony there in the beach. To my surprise Naveen Arthi Manjusha and Varun were absent. It was doubtful but didn’t create any suspision at that point of time.
Then we washed our faces and left the beach to my house…
Morning 8 am
Reached home… tried going through the backdoor but found a lot of slippers outside! A voice cried to come through the front door!! I was able to notice lots of balloons hanging inside my house! Still in order to respect the effort in that voice I decided to go through the front door…
“Futt!!!” A balloon went off when I went through the front door cracking the shit out of me..! When I opened my eyes again I was able to see everyone waiting for me with a cake, clown caps and presents! 🙂 What the heck!!! ??? Then I cut the cake.. fed myself,my parents and friends mouth with the black forest ecstasy!! Lots of fun and potos!! 😛
Morning 9 am
We started discussing plans for the day when aarthi and naveen revealed that they won’t be available for the day! Another twist in the story.,, clearly suspicious this time. Anyways I didn’t want to spoil the plans that they had for the day already and hence didn’t insist them to stay. I hurried bathing and wore my new shirt .. Then came the next surprise…
The present… After a struggle in opening the gift for about 10 mins A brand new fasttrack watch and a shirt from Peter england!!! :p my goodness!!! 🙂 both fitted perfectly to my nature and hence became exceptional gifts… Do you think thats the end of the story??? then read down…
Morning 9 30am
After reading the greetings in card and trying the new watch Arthi and naveen left … And the rest of us decided to go to skywalk mall for window shopping and stuff… We all got ready, had a sweet short breakfast and left to skywalk.
Morning 10 25am
We reached skywalk.. I had never been to the mall before. Was quite excited about roaming there. We went to the fourth floor and then came the next surprise.
PVR theatres… Naveen and Arthi were waiting here with tickets for Inception.. My goodness!! What can make my b day much better !! We all rushed in to occupy our seats .. We were on time for the movie..
Afternoon 1pm
All our brains were equally tired after the movie! After holding some doubt clearing sessions on the movie for KVK and Naveen we finally decided to go for lunch to Barbeque nations, T Nagar 🙂
Afternoon 2 30pm
Since we didn’t reserve a table we had to kill sometime before we got a table to start the treat … Finally at 3 pm we settled down for lunch buffet @ Barbeque Nations. Starters ‘n starters ‘n starters .. holy god!!! we were almost full for the vast variety of starters there.. prawns were awesome and fishes were equally tasty.. every item had a unique taste and hence we all hunted them down one by one..
Then we moved to the main course and then to desserts.. round1 round2 round3 etc… we all were rolling at our places almost after the enormous amount of food intake… Finally after settling the bill we all moved out…
Evening 5pm
We spent time chatting outside and usual kalaichifying… 🙂 and finally left home!! 🙂
To sum up.. A wonderful day.. Can’t make it better… Thanks a lot friends for making it so special.. No doubt this is the best b’day so far.. I wont forget how I turned 20 … 🙂
raavan speaks 