Participant: Herry
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Interned at: Hewlett-Packard
I would strongly recommend the students to take an internship. The internship gave me an opportunity to having a better understanding of industrial problems, which can help to focus PhD research, as well as working with the tools which are commonly used. I also have new industrial contacts who can be useful for future collaboration.
“During the internship I learned the working culture of an industrial company that cannot be found in the university.”
Whilst on the internship I was given two tasks. The first one was conducting a survey on popular system configuration management tools. The results were written as a technical report submitted to the management and I also presented the results in an internal seminar. The second task was developing a prototype tool for automated configuration management of cloud services using the company’s computing infrastructure and in-house softwares. The prototype was then tested using industrial use-cases and the results were presented to the management.
During the internship I learned the working culture of an industrial company that cannot be found in the university, which gave me guidance on decisions for my future career. I plan to propose another research collaboration project with my contacts of the company Partner which will be in the same research area but focusing on a different topic.
1. Best thing you have worked on whilst on the internship so far: Developing a prototype configuration tool for a large-scale computing infrastructure.
2. One way that the internship has helped your research: I can get real use-cases for my experiments.
3. One thing you have learned about yourself from the internship: I need to manage my time better.
4. Three skills you have gained from the experience: The way to communicate my research to industrial people; The process to develop a good software; The way to create a technical report for industry.
5. Sum up your internship experience in three words: Fun, travelling, and friendly.
