Basic Information

  • Name: Anannay Jain
  • Email: jainanannay@gmail.com
  • Curriculum: Dual Degree
  • Year of Study: 5th
  • Company / University: IBM Research
  • Role: AI Research intern
  • Duration: 25 Summers
  • Mode: On-site
  • Location: Bangalore

Targeted Domain

LLM Research Roles

How I Got This Internship

I came across this opportunity on LinkedIn, where several IBM lab groups were looking for interns, and I applied at the end of September. The interviews took place in the second week of November, with three different lab groups conducting separate interviews over the span of a week. The offer letter was released in January.

Preparation Resources

I refreshed my machine learning fundamentals through Andrew Ng’s courses and StatQuest, and supplemented this with Medium articles to deepen my understanding of LLMs and the techniques used in their fine-tuning.

Tests and Interviews

They asked questions on fine-tuning, LoRA, and my previous internship work. In one round, they included a DSA problem related to linked lists and binary trees. They also tested my understanding of Hugging Face libraries such as PEFT and Accelerate.

Handling Rejections

I believed that a better opportunity would come my way. In off-campus internships, rejections are quite common since applications are often overlooked, but I kept belivingthat someone will notice eventually

Work / Project

I worked on improving performance on Text to Cypher task for efficient data retrieval from knowledge graphs.

Organizational Culture

The internship culture was enjoyable, with plenty of events organized, including a trip to Wonderla. My peers came from institutions like IIT Delhi, IIT Kharagpur, and IIIT Hyderabad, and we had a great time exchanging ideas and playing foosball during coffee breaks.

Networking

I built good connections with my mentors and managers, and there were also a few sessions organized for interns to interact directly with the Director.

Overall Experience

The internship experience was truly enjoyable, and the three months passed by in a blink. At times, the workload was intense due to paper deadlines, but there were also plenty of moments spent exploring a new city, visiting different places, and playing Uno with peers. Overall, it was a rewarding and memorable experience.

Would You Recommend?

I would say that different research groups focus on different topics, and the kind of project you get selected for really matters. Some projects offer a deeper learning experience than others, so it’s important to look into what a particular group is working on before applying. I would recommend this internship if you’re genuinely interested in research, but keep in mind that some tasks in the industry may revolve around agents (prompt engineering under the hood). If you’re working with new frameworks for the first time, it’s a great learning opportunity—otherwise, it depends on your interests. Beyond the work itself, the quality of peers and the overall culture were excellent.