I will be going over my remote-internship journey (Due to COVID-19) in the coming paragraphs and will try to generalise the process on how you get good internships in the field of your interests, in labs and research groups both in India as well as outside of it.
Before moving forward, I want to put some general facts about my profile that helped me and some of them are : I had good programming experience under my belt and that helped me shift over to virtual computational projects and save my summers. I had good previous research experiences in organic chemistry and virology and that helped my profile, as my semester and winter internships fetched me great letters of Recommendation. With that being said, now let us focus on the meat of the topic, “How do young undergrads get research internships?”.
I started planning for my summers from November’2019, taking guidelines from seniors and writing well crafted personalized mails to professors in India. It went well till February and I got a few acceptances for the summers, but with COVID-19 in place in my freshman year summer, my plans of joining my old labs and IISER’s were completely closed.
Opportunities were being cancelled left-right and center and all my in-person internships were reduced. I had found my current PI at ELSI Japan through Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, and I read his papers on prebiotic chemistry and decided to write him a mail in late february (notice this is the worst time to mail foreign proofs as summers are around
the corner. Start mailing by October-November), since there are not enough official funded programs for first and second year undergrads. I took pointers on how to write better emails, and how to mail at specific times so as to improve the chances of it being read. With a well crafted CV (in LaTex) and a mail, I was interviewed for the position of summer research associate (remote) in late March. The onboarding (sharing relevant papers, working out a workflow, managing the PI’s as well as mine expectations) was done in april and I officially started working from April 10th.
This was a highly computational project in pre-biotic chemistry and I, being a naive undergraduate, was daunted by it. We had a team of 6 people from all around the world speaking 2 other languages (Spanish and Turkish). My professor made it clear at the starting of the internship that we intend to publish the project and present it in Conferences. I also got ample opportunities through collaborations (Europe), writing book chapters (through seniors), simultaneous multiple internship and attending summer schools in biophysics and neurosciences.
My project was “ A computational simulation of a reaction network involved in alkaline degradation of glucose and Simulating chemical reaction networks involving life-essential molecules” and my group used an automated rule-based reaction generation to simulate the reaction network on well studied reactions and applied graph transformation rules 2 based on well-documented reaction mechanisms and the reaction network was further assessed for the existence of potentially autocatalytic loops. This was done by loading the network topology (nodes being compounds and edges being reactions) into a graph database where pattern matching queries could be executed to search for patterns of interest and our work demonstrates some efficient methods for finding reaction pathways and autocatalysis in in silico modeled reaction networks.
Phew! That was full of technical jargon, but in simpler terms we made a reaction network of molecules that were present in pre-biotic conditions, say glucose and HCN. Reacted them, and checked for autocatalysis to figure out how they were propagated further and the connections associated. Our work can be considered important to study the origins of life.
We used a lot of computational tools in python and wrote some of our scripts to generate, visualize and correlate our products. I went through a lot of paper, presented my work in front of my group a number of times and took feedback. The internship was remote and timezones were an issue, added to the stress induced by COVID-19, it wasn’t that productive as it should be in simpler times. Over the summer I collaborated with other groups and other interns for poster presentations and submitted and attended 4 international conferences( in astrobiology and origins of life) with my group (Always look out for opportunities, I even got a cool one on Reddit and collaborate as much as you can). I held virtual coffee chats with all my co-interns and collaborators and got to know their projects and made friendships. Socialising is a key of every internship and that’s one of the drawback with virtual internships.
My PI, Dr. Jim Cleaves (Professor, ELSI-Japan) supported me in every way possible, since i did not have all the background knowledge required and was computationally challenged as compared to my peers. I spent nearly 4 months and it has been a good summer experience.
One thing I would love to do more is manage times accordingly to other internships and keep making small progress, day by day, it helps to keep track of your performance. Keep asking people questions and how can you improve and that’s all from my side.
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