DAAD WISE 2024

I entered college with a handful of goals - one of which, and one of the more important was the DAAD WISE scholarship. It sounded like the perfect dream - you take up an internship with a mentor you want to work with and also get a scholarship for going on-site for 2-3 months. For those who don't know about the DAAD WISE programme, it's a scholarship offered by Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, German for "German Academic Exchange Service" for Working Internships in Science and Engineering (WISE). The WISE aims to foster research between Germany and India and offers this programme to undergraduate students in India to pursue a 2-3 month research internship in a German university. It has been discontinued though.

So 2nd year rolled around and I prepared to apply for it. Naturally, it was very chaotic since it was amidst core courses while also trying to secure an internship for the upcoming summer. I reached out to labs and professors related to topics that I was familiar with and was interested in, finally locked in with the Dark Matter Lab at the University of Hamburg (AG Nikolopoulos). We did a lot of paperwork together in order for me to apply for the scholarship and I sent the thick stack of documents to the DAAD office in New Delhi in November 2023. After this we could only wait for the results. Since DAAD is so selective, I was scared that I wouldn't get the scholarship. I didn't want to waste the summer break of 3 month we get so like the other students, I applied to other internships too. The only other place where I made progress was with Goldman Sachs' summer analyst internship. I got through the online assessments and got through 3 rounds of knockout interviews over 6 hours thanks to my projects. I got the news when I was in a train to Hyderabad to attend a Women Engineers' Bootcamp at IIITH. It felt amazing, I might have weirded out the people around me by smiling so much at an email in my phone, but yes I was happy I landed such an internship. I immediately called my parents to inform them and my mother asked me what I'd do if I also get DAAD WISE, I said I'd see since it's not that likely anyways. Anyways so then came January 2024, I was checking my emails after my class and my heart dropped, rolled away and evaporated when I saw the email that confirmed my scholarship. I had always been incredibly worried about my career and just the question "What will I do in my life?" since 6th grade. I had spent days overthinking about what I could do in the worst of scenarios which maybe I shouldn't get to on such a blog. So getting a good corporate internship and an even bigger research internship with a scholarship was a big moment for me and my self-confidence. I tried a lot to re-schedule the Goldman Sachs internship after my DAAD WISE internship to get the best of both worlds but that didn't work out. After this things went by in a blur. One fancy part was getting a priority special appointment for the visa. One not so fancy part was hunting for accommodation under such short notice. Another not so fancy part was waiting for a confirmed rental agreement in order to open an online bank account. All while handling assignments and course exams. 

But finally, the semester ended. I went home. Packed. 

I landed in Hamburg.

The first few days were a lot to take in. I was very exhausted after traveling. I was also excited but very nervous for the internship. I had to get my hands on a sim card first, figure out public transport since I had to report for my first day the day after I landed, do paperwork for obtaining an ID card to enter the DESY campus, pick up some German pleasantries, get some essentials from a supermarket and so on. So it took a while to settle in. 

Coming to the internship, initially I took some time to get an idea of what all was going on in the lab and what I'd be working on. Everyone at the lab was very helpful and kind. After some reading guided by my professor, I did calibration studies which helped me get familiar with the lab equipment. I spent the majority of my internship programming the instruments (oscilloscope, voltage supply etc.) so that experiments and data collection could be automated. This was incredibly fun. These were very specific instruments and each had it's own developer's manual. I went through them one by one, writing scripts for each of them. One cool challenge I faced here was when one instrument didn't have a native wrapper library in Python but the existing code base was all Python. This is when I got to use a C-Python interface. I also got to attend a doctoral thesis defence which was both intense and extremely cool. There was also a lot of cultural exchange since the research group was very diverse. We learned about each other's cultures and bonded over similarities in our cuisines.

During some of the weekends, I'd made some local trips.

The U-boat museum in Hamburg where you actually get to go inside a U-434, a Russian spy submarine decommissioned in 1995.

Schwerin Castle

Amsterdam and Zaanse Schans

Berlin. Loved the museums, specifically the Topography of Terror. Saw an Enigma machine and lots of wonderful art.

When I got back home, I felt a year older. I mean it in the best way possible. I felt like I learned so much and saw so much. Went to work on weekdays, did chores, cooked for myself, went on weekend trips, tracked expenses and met so many people.