My Internship Experience at TCS Innovation Labs

It was in my third semester that I came to know what Competitive Programming (CP) and Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) were and why both are important for company interviews. I thought I didn't have enough time and started practicing coding immediately! During the winter break after the third semester, I used to solve DSA problems based on BinaryTrees and Binary Search Trees. I was improving gradually. I also felt very confident about the DSA Lab course in the upcoming fourth semester at that time. Since DSA is kind of a big deal, if you want to get a good internship or a job, I suggest practicing it even before the professors teach you. I also practiced DSA in the summer break after the fourth semester for like a month and a half. I used to maintain a list of problems that I did every day with dates and links to the problems. The problems were mainly from 450dsa.com.

But soon, I realized that I was getting sick and tired of waking up every day, solving problems and the whole drama of debugging my code if there was an error. And at the same time, I was kind of intrigued by Machine Learning and AI which were untouched by me at that time. In addition, I also had some qualms about working as a traditional software engineer in a software company. After some research on the internet, I learned about how research in computer science would be and how it would be easier to switch from a research-based career to a non-research-based career than vice-versa. After a series of such events, with a bunch of twists and turns, I was pretty lost and felt that I didn't know what I wanted in life! Since I was not particularly fixated on a single thing, I was open to trying out multiple different things. I decided to apply for research internships as well, as I really wanted to try out research. And soon, through in-campus internship opportunities, I applied for TCS Innovation labs and got an offer as a Research Intern.

After my third year, my internship started. Since it was a research internship, I had to do some reading of research papers and understand the problem that I was going to be working on – the Vehicle Routing Problem, which is basically a graph problem. The aim was to apply Reinforcement Learning (RL) to provide a solution to the problem. I had no inkling of how RL works and how it can be used in my project. So in the first week and most of the second week, I used to concurrently read the research papers and learn RL from the internet. Every time I sat down to learn something, let's say a particular concept, I realized that there were a lot of prerequisites that I had to learn before diving into learning the original concept. So I would make a list of things that I had to learn and learn everything sequentially. It was genuinely a great learning experience!

After I felt confident in RL and related concepts, I got my first task, which was to implement an algorithm that was introduced in a particular research paper. For the most part of the internship, my mentors gave me work of a similar nature. I used to plot graphs related to the performance of the model and such. Towards the end of the internship, I was asked to tabulate the final results in an excel sheet and submit everything, including code, documentation, plots, excel sheets, etc.

In the meantime, I was also preparing for the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) since I knew I wanted to study further in the future. The GRE is an exam used by foreign universities as a criterion for evaluating applications. I used to spend time on both internship and GRE-prep everyday. But things got a bit relaxed in my internship, in the second half of the second month (because my mentors were working on a paper and the deadline was nearby). Since I was left with a lot of free time, I started spending more time on my GRE preparation and also watched those movies on my list. I used to enjoy spending time preparing for the GRE, as it had been a long time since I prepared for an exam with MCQs like the IIT-JEE.

In conclusion, it was a good experience working as a research intern. The whole internship experience was very smooth and enjoyable. On a closing note, I would like to emphasize that if you're someone like me who doesn't know what you want in life, I highly recommend that you explore and try out all the different things, and don't stick to one particular thing just because it is a safe option and can guarantee a job. After all, you might end up not liking it at all. That said, I wish you all good luck and a happy internship experience!