Name: Anil Jangam
Internship, Co-op or Research Site: FutureWei Technologies - Santa Clara, CA
Major(s)/Minor(s): Computer Science
Expected Graduation Year: Master Student - December 2014
Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research, or service-learning opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.
Internet with its current architecture/design, is becoming insufficient to cope up with the ever increasing bandwidth demands. As per the Moor's law, the computing and storage capability is increasing faster than the evolution of the core network. The increasing use of smart phones is also putting additional load onto the network. I could study some of these network related challenges to a greater detail, and the approaches research and engineering communities are devising to meet these demands. As an intern, I got the opportunity to work with a team of researchers at FutureWei, on a project in systems and algorithmic research in content delivery network architectures. The project involves using and extending existing open source tools to specify and prototype storage and distribution of content over a LAN-wide and in particular, how to distribute video streams.
Describe the process of obtaining your internship, research, or co-op opportunity.
Since I knew my requirements, I searched for the people and companies on Linkedin who were working in the area of my interests. After shortlisting, I wrote the email to each individual with my resumes, and followed each one of them for sometime before getting a call for further discussion. Overall it took about two months to get an offer letter.
Which of the following resources did you use to find your current experience?
Career Center, LinkedIn
What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?
Learning the problems through existing work being done in form of research papers, brainstorming and discussions, and eventually developing the systems to demonstrate the problem itself and the solutions. Enjoyed most on developing prototypes using various different opensource tools with corss platform deployments. Enjoyed coding in Java, C++ etc.
What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?
Research experience! FutureWei being a US R&D center of Huwwei, focuses mainly on researching the problems and proposing the solutions to them. Currently I am also in the process of documenting and publishing the work being done at a IEEE research conference. We are going to submit our work in form of a research paper.
What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?
Having worked in an industry on live projects before coming for full-time MS studies, I knew what I wanted to do. The same experience also helped me land an internship at FutureWei precisely in the domain area I wanted to be in. I certainly recommend to everyone to know your goals ahead of time and I would say, half the battle is already won! It's a win-win situation for both student, and the employer.
Please provide a short quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process.
Follow your passion, be consistent and you will be all right!