By Kimberley Clementi
The Computer Science and Engineering department hosted its tenth annual Summer Internship Symposium in October to celebrate the department’s robust internship program and highlight student achievements during their summer engineering internships.
“These internships provide students with valuable mentorship and experience with real-world projects as well as the practical, technical, and professional insights needed to prepare them for future careers,” said Mia Minnes, CSE vice chair for undergraduate education and faculty lead for the program. “We applaud all our students’ accomplishments and appreciate our incredible host companies.”
Roughly 50 student interns participated in this year’s symposium poster session, presenting their projects to 100 other students and faculty and industry guests. Over the past decade, students have shared 1,000+ posters, and more than 400 diverse companies have hosted full-time engineering internships at sites across California and surrounding states and as far away as New York City, Washington DC, and Taipei Taiwan.
Third-year CSE student Annie Phan interned at Qualcomm, where her responsibilities included combing through source code and Application Programming Interface (API) calls and writing cases to test out Modem device features. Besides gaining technical skills, Phan says the internship taught her the value of teamwork and effective communication.
“It is important to develop your interpersonal skills and put yourself out there to meet team members, intern peers, and co-workers,” said Phan.
Alessia Welch, a third-year computer science major, interned at Goldman Sachs as a Summer Engineering Analyst in the Controllers' Division in Dallas, Texas.
“The internship experience was amazing. Having a positive attitude is super important. Not only did having a positive attitude help me solve my programming bugs quicker, it also had an impact on my team and helped brighten their day!,” she said.
Second-year CSE student Ashish Jayamohan interned at Surface Optics where he worked on adding customization features for taking more nuanced measurements with the SOC-210 bidirectional reflectometer, which tested his abilities in both coding and theoretical math.
“The internship was such a huge learning experience for me, and I really appreciate the opportunity,” said Jayamohan. “My biggest take-away was learning that optics and imaging is the field of research I really want to specialize in. And I don’t think I would’ve learned that any other way,” he said.
“The symposium was great because it forced me to think critically about my experience and what I really gained from the whole summer. I think it was also useful for developing my technical communication skills,” he said.
The 2023 Summer Internship Symposium recognized 12 students with awards for outstanding presentations in three categories: Technical Skills, Personal & Professional Growth, and Ethics & Society.
2023 Symposium Award Recipients
Technical Skills: Annie Phan and Ashish Jayamohan (Awardees); Yuliana Chavez and Jordan Peranginangin (Honorable Mention)
Personal & Professional Growth: Alon Lahav and Faith Lu (Awardees); Alessia Welch and Pratyush Sahu (Honorable Mention)
Ethics & Society: Mingyi Li and Lindsey Manzano (Awardees); Delaware Wade and Anuj Jain (Honorable Mention)