CS Grad Programs: Summer Research Internships and CV Progression - acmutd/help-guide GitHub Wiki

Summer Research Internships

Each summer, you should try to pursue research based industry/government internships, NSF REU opportunities, or independent research at universities. The motivation is simple: you want to demonstrate that you are proficient at research when applying to graduate schools. A software engineering (SWE) job will not really help you do this, as you are not performing research as a software engineer.

Nonetheless, I did spend quite a bit of time and effort in applying to SWE roles my freshman / sophomore year, if only because I was not 100% set on pursuing a PhD at the time. This is completely okay, I don't think most people are completely sure on what they want to do after they graduate (besides vaguely referring to "software engineering"). In fact, during this time period I made a point to keep my options open and attend every career fair, interact with recruiters, and apply for SWE jobs. This built up my confidence and important soft skills which would later help me get a research position. For this reason, I would still recommend younger students to follow a lot of the advice that is listed out in the career fair. It is always beneficial to acquire and improve upon your soft skills, and maybe you find that you'll enjoy SWE more than research!

There are generally three types of research that you can do over the summer:

  1. Industry / Government Research Internship

You can perform research at a company or government lab. For example, Fermilab, Sandia National Labs, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Labs, Microsoft Research, etc.

  1. NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU)

These are NSF funded summer programs created to involve students in research during their undergraduate career.

  1. Independent research at a university

This includes cold-emailing a professor at UTD or any other university, and typically providing your own funding for performing research. If you already live on UTD campus then it is worth, but otherwise you should typically try to only find funded experiences.

I spent some time putting together a master list of research internships and REUs that I have looked over or applied for. I also included a CV and some example personal statements for the applications in which I was successful.

Finding a summer research experience can be difficult to start with, especially if you have had no previous research experiences. For this reason, I would recommend you to, firstly, not freak out if you don't have anything your first or second summer. Instead, focus on gaining research experience at or around UTD. You can find out how to do that in the getting involved in research section of this guide!

There are some differences with normal internships and REUs. For normal SWE internships, you will not need letters of recommendation. For REUs, you will probably need 1, if not 2 letters. Ideally, all your letters come from professors you do research with. However, if you are a younger undergrad and have only done research with a single lab, it's probably okay to only have one of your letters come from a course professor (although that letter will generally be useless). By the time you get to PhD applications, your goal should be to have all 3 required letters come from professors you have performed research with.

Since rec letters are required to participate in REUs, you are probably not going to have much luck as a first semester freshman unless you had participated in research before you started university. In addition, the NSF REU Program Solicitation itself states that:

"Historically, the vast majority of REU participants have been junior- or senior-level undergraduate students 
who have typically already committed to a major in science or engineering. So that the REU program can succeed 
in attracting students into science and engineering who might not otherwise consider those majors and careers, 
projects are encouraged to involve students at earlier stages in their college experience. Some REU projects 
effectively engage first-year and second-year undergraduates by developing partnerships with community colleges."

Translation: you are competing against junior and senior level undergrads so you probably won't be selected as a Freshman unless you are absolutely outstanding. However, it does also mean that there could be REU programs targeted towards Freshman / Sophomores. I remember running into some, but unfortunately cannot find any as of writing.

CV Progression

I have gone ahead and uploaded as many different versions of my CV as I could find starting from my freshman year until I applied to PhD programs. Before your imposter syndrome sets in, I really really want to emphasize that your path my be very different. The point of me sharing each version of my CV is to offer you a better idea about how competitive certain summer research programs may be (especially in machine learning). This will (hopefully) calibrate your expectations with regards to being able to conduct research at other, perhaps more prestigious, universities over each summer. I also want to be as transparent as possible with regards to my advice, and this is only possible when you completely understand my background with regards to a particular application. This allows you to qualitatively understand with some anecdotal evidence what I mean when I write that "CS PhD programs" or "CS REUs" are competitive.

Do not use my CV as a template for creating your own (except perhaps my most recent). With my current knowledge / experience, I would certainly do things differently within each of the versions which I provide for reference here. Instead, check out the awesome resume guide section of this guide. Almost everything there will apply to research CVs as well, and I will also note the differences here (once that part is written).

I have taken screenshots of my resumes (instead of just providing the pdfs) so that they will not be indexed by daddy G crawlers, so I apologize for the poor image quality in advance! I attended UTD from Aug 2017 to May 2021 to help you calibrate the dates and information across my CV.

Year 1

As a freshman, your focus should be on starting to accumulate research experience ASAP. This means trying to join a research lab: see here for more info on doing that. Since I was lucky to partake in the Clark Summer Research Program, I had experience before starting freshman year (albeit in a subfield I wasn't interested in). I leveraged this to get into a subfield that I did want to pursue (machine learning).

If you look at my 2018-01-27 CV, you can see that besides my research experience I don't have much on there. You could completely delete the "Volunteer Work" section, that's useless. Furthermore, I only had one real side-project (MyUTD). The other two side projects I listed were just rehashing my research experiences. Therefore, I didn't even bother applying for any research internships. However, note that there are some REUs / summer programs indented for students without any research experience, or perhaps for minorities (which includes women and/or racial minorities) with no research experience. If you fall under these categories, I urge you to look for more information on google (unfortunately, I don't have any experience here). You could very well be able to land research internships this way, and you should certainly take advantage of it.

In addition, I went to every career and intern fair UTD offered (so at least 3 my freshman year). This gave me the important opportunity to build my soft skills and practice talking to recruiters. At the time, I was not 100% set on research, so I did try a fair amount to get a SWE internship, although with no success. Furthermore, by the time of my 2018-04-24 CV, I realized that I could start taking advantage of hackathons. Hackathons give you the opportunity to boost your resume with side-projects, and if they are related to aspects of research which you would like to go into, it will give you the opportunity to talk about something research-related during interviews down the line.

Although I ended up staying the summer at UTD, I was able to work at two research labs and also took some summer courses to get ahead on my degree plan. This option lets you build out your resume to be stronger down the line! Try to do useful / fun stuff during the summer after freshman year, you probably won't have time like this again :).

Year 2

By my second year, I was able to land a research-based government contract internship with the above resume. My only tip here is to apply to REUs as well as perhaps government research positions. However, given the choice of both, always go with the REU (even if it is not at a "well-known" university). This is because the REU will allow you to receive not only a recommendation letter, but perhaps even a publication down the line. This probably won't happen, even in a research-focused government contract role, as the latter tends to be more about applying research to problems.

Nonetheless, both will help you land a more competitive REU the following summer, which is arguably the most important.

Year 3

By my third year, I was fortunate to have a simple publication. Using the above resume, I was able to have plenty of choice with regards to where I wanted to spend the summer before my senior year. I encourage you to apply to 10-15 REUs if you are seriously shooting for one, since they can be quite competitive. I applied for 12 REUs / summer research programs, and was accepted into 5. Each program had anywhere from 100-2000 applications for a relatively small number of positions. I ended up working at Washington University in St. Louis with an absolutely wonderful professor who later wrote me a recommendation letter for grad school apps.