Basic Information

  • Name: Vidisha
  • Email: vidishaagarwal2005@gmail.com
  • Curriculum: B.Tech.
  • Year of Study: 4th
  • Company / University: Siemens
  • Role: ML Research
  • Duration: 25 Summers
  • Mode: On-site
  • Location: Bangalore

Targeted Domain

Software or ML

How I Got This Internship

I started cold mailing on LinkedIn Premium in December. Heard back from 70% of them, most of them saying there is no position open. For the rest, I secured interviews in those companies. Roughly I approached 200-300 people on LinkedIn.

I cold mailed for Siemens in January and received call from HR in February. The OA happened soon after a few days and the interview after a week of that. There was only one round of technical interview and one round of HR interview. I got the offer letter by February end.

Preparation Resources

Prepared DSA from Leetcode, regularly practiced aptitude questions and puzzles from Brainstellar, and revised all the things mentioned in my resume

Tests and Interviews

OA- My branch is electrical, so I was asked around 20-25 MCQs in that and the rest was normal aptitude questions-logical reasoning, numerical questions( profit-loss, work and days, pipes and cisterns etc), visual patterns. I was given 1 hr for this test.

Technical Interview- Questions on my resume projects, they went deep into the projects i had mentioned in my resume. I even screen shared to show my code and explain it in details. Since the team i was working with was robotics+CV they focused mainly on my CV projects and asked some questions on Linear Algebra.

Handling Rejections

I was expecting to not get any replies on LinkedIn but surprisingly most of them did reply. Most of them just told that they dont have any positions open, which was again expected. I just kept approaching more and more people and didnt stop preparing. At the end, you just need one company to give you an interview and you just have to crack that one.

Work / Project

My team was working on automation and it was robotics+CV based. I was working on CV projects. I worked on two major projects during the internship. First was surface defect detection of tiny defects like cracks, scratches, discoloration etc on copper busbars. The challenge was limited data. I just had 5-6 pictures of each defect type and since the pictures came directly from the factory, they were not very reliable for model training. Second was generation of test sequence and instruction from circuits in a PDF. This was more of an OCR task. I had to make the model read electrical circuits( symbols, wiring and all connections) in order to generate testing instructions for an individual to test all panels. Since the PDF contained more than 200 pages with complicated circuits, it was time consuming to do it manually so we wanted to automate this task.

Organizational Culture

Yeah the culture is very good. The interns only interacted with the team members who were our mentors. We never got a chance to talk to the manager. The mentors were really sweet, supportive and approachable, always ready to clarify and doubts and give suggestions. The environment was very flexible—there were no strict office timings or deadlines, no micromanagement. And since this was a research team and our projects were completely open ended topics, there was full freedom to experiment and try out new ideas. Most importantly, interns were included in all the meetings with the other teams for the specific project. I was given the opportunity to pitch my ideas for the project in front of other senior members of the company. That really helped build confidence.

My co-interns were really nice as well. I got to interact with interns from my team as well as other teams. All interns worked on independent projects, but still we could always reach out for help and learn some things from them as well. We used to have weekly team meetings, where each intern would talk about their project and what all they worked on in the previous week. This helped all of us to learn and appreciate their ideas and the various challenges they faced in their projects.

Networking

Yes definitely. Apart from my own team members/mentors, I interacted with people from other teams. These connections would really help in the future- for career advice or other job opportunities and referrals. I would suggest being open to networking and conversations as you never know when those contacts might guide you in the future.

Overall Experience

overall experience was positive and enriching. Its a great place to work if you want a self-paced environment (without any rigid deadlines) and are enthusiastic about research since you have the freedom to explore, learn and experiment without too much pressure. The people here are genuinely very nice and supportive. I found the overall workflow a bit slow at times, which might delay or block your progress on certain projects.

Would You Recommend?

One thing to keep in mind- they dont offer PPOs to interns in the research department. And they take 90% of interns in the research department. So, if you are looking for an internship to get a PPO, this is not the company for you. They do not offer PPOs to interns who have worked for 2-3 months. Some teams might offer PPOs to interns who have worked for over a year. But if you are into research and just want to learn and explore, it is a great place to work. Each team in the research department is working on industry level projects so it gives you a good exposure and freedom to experiment.