INI students innovate at internships
From Pittsburgh to Palo Alto and Fort Meade to Seattle, Information Networking Institute (INI) students innovated at summer internships with top tech companies, research centers and government agencies.
While the perks are many—dog-friendly offices, outings to baseball games, and lots of free food—for INI students the key takeaway from their summer internships was working independently on a project with real impact in the fields of data science, mobility, machine learning, software engineering, cybersecurity, R&D, and more.
At Facebook’s 1 Hacker Way, Kung-Hsien Yu was told to “move fast and don’t be afraid to break something.” It is a sentiment that resonates across all internships as INI students applied classroom knowledge to real-world projects. Amidst rapid prototyping, building software, pushing code into production, and developing security tools, students gained invaluable work experience and networking connections that laid the groundwork for full-time employment.
As a software engineering intern at Pinterest, Caleb de la Cruz endeavored to make the virtual pinboard faster. “I love this job because you get to work on challenging problems alongside coworkers who are extremely talented,” he says.
By obtaining these outstanding career opportunities and developing new skills, our students make a difference in the tech world.
Jessica Budik, Associate Director of Career Services, Information Networking Institute
In the shadow of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, research intern Simran Gujral modernized the TLS stack in Mozilla’s Servo. Along the way, she learned that failure and asking questions are both part of the creative process. “Each person here is a creator,” she says. “They have amazing ideas and the design space is so open. We are constantly pushed to innovate.”
At LinkedIn, Zhiyuan Lin attended the Hadoop Summit, where she networked with the industry’s best engineers and managers. Her project—automating the Apache Spark tuning recommendation—will be an incredible resource for LinkedIn and the entire Spark community.
This year’s top internship employers were Amazon, VMware, Yahoo, Google and Salesforce. Several students remained in Pittsburgh, interning with CyLab and the Software Engineering Institute’s CERT division.
“I am so proud of our students for stepping outside of their comfort zones to connect with top employers,” says Jessica Budik, INI’s associate director of career services. “By obtaining these outstanding career opportunities and developing new skills, our students make a difference in the tech world.”
