Hello everyone! I'm Swathi, and I interned at EPFL
(École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), Switzerland this summer through the
Summer@EPFL programme. I worked on leveraging deep learning techniques for
lensless 3D imaging in autonomous vehicles, affiliated with an on-going project
at Sensing and Networking (SENS)
Lab. It was a 3-month long internship, over which I had the opportunity to
understand the status of research, conduct a literature pore over and
contribute to it. But let me spare you the complex jargon and dive into
something less technical and more interesting - navigating a new country all
alone as a barely 18-year-old and mastering the art of survival.
Life changed gears when I found myself cramming all my belongings (plus memories, excitement, anxiety and fear of existence) into a 30 kg suitcase and boarding an international flight to an unseen country. As I proceeded through the main gate of the airport terminal after the security check and lost sight of my parents waving goodbye, a blend of emotions made my heart heavier than the luggage I carried. At first, everything seemed like a struggle, right from unloading the luggage at the airport to making friends with Google Maps for survival. It definitely took time for me to understand that ‘Sortie’ meant ‘Exit’ and ‘Prochain arrêt’ meant ‘Next Stop’. But the people were very hospitable and friendly (albeit the linguistic difference) and helped me keep my journey on momentum. Cut to 5pm, 18th May 2024, 3 hours after experiencing a panoramic landing on the banks of Lake Geneva, I finally reached my studio flat in Lausanne. Being on the brink of a new life was so overwhelming that it put me to sleep, helping evade exhaustion (and homesickness :)). I was supposed to join the office on 21st May, which gave me two days to learn the basics of cooking well enough to not burn anything (‘survival of the fittest’, as Darwin claims). But even after applying all the laws of physics, I still don’t understand how I “cooked” rice without the whistle blowing even once on the first day, how my taste buds got accustomed to any proportion of salt that I added to my food or how I managed without complaining about the same menu every day.
The cost of living in Switzerland is steep. A standout
one-liner would be, ‘It’s a country where Mercedes is a taxi and alcohol is as
cheap as water’. Conversion rates hit your cortisol levels every time you swipe
your card. But being a student intern in Europe offers a lot of privilege in
terms of tourism and transport. And for me, this was the best part of the
internship - I got to explore so much of Europe, including Paris, Venice,
Munich and many other places offering scintillating views in budget trips (a
maximum of 200 EUD). Rail Europe, Flix buses and tourist hostels offer
student friendly travel plans throughout Europe. Through travel, I understood
the cultural and ideological differences in the European way of living. The
people I encountered were sincere but not workaholics, exemplifying one of the
best work-life balance I ever witnessed. As for the cuisines, hailing from
South India, there were times when I found European food extremely bland,
especially on days where I had no choices in Wednesday team lunches. But of
course, I was more than satisfied with their extensive collection of desserts
and baked goods (croissants to be specific).
I would also like to use this opportunity to talk about my fantastic experience as a research intern. One gets a chance to not only interact with PhDs and professors closely and get to know what a "day in the life of a researcher" looks like, but also collaborate with peer interns from different intellectual backgrounds, discuss their future goals and perspectives about technology. The lab offered space for multiple tiny research communities namely imaging-sensing, 5G, biomolecular networks etc. to function autonomously yet closely knit together by discussion of ideas. Some of the heated conversations on paper writing and presentations between co-PhDs during team lunches still stand vivid in my memory. I spent the first few weeks ramping up concepts and thoroughly reviewing the prior work relevant to my problem statement. Following this, I worked on collecting a diverse radar dataset for testing and benchmarking baseline models on Point Cloud completion tasks. My PhD guide gave me helpful tips whenever I hit a bottleneck instead of completely solving it for me. The last few weeks I spent on implementing a new transfer learning module for rotational invariance on top of our current model for better performance. More often than not, I had the freedom to explore the problem statement we were working on independently, suggest changes and implement them myself, which was great for expanding my own knowledge.
Well, learning curve apart, Europe provided me with a profound lesson on self-reliance. From being the accounts manager of my own money to making timely decisions on the hundreds of problems life throws at you every day, from deciding which place to visit and making the itinerary to reminding myself about which groceries need to be finished before running into spoilage, from hunting for and renting an apartment on my own to checking on valuables time and again, these 3 months gradually transitioned me from a school-going kid to a self-reliant individual. Would I do this again? Of course, yes. But was the journey smooth? Definitely not. There were times I felt alone, helpless and indecisive. I took the wrong metro and got lost in an unknown city, broke a coffee mug while panicking, got locked out when I forgot my keys, drained the charge on my phone in the middle of a trip and generally struggled to bridge the differences between home and a foreign country. But difficult roads always lead to beautiful destinations, don't they?
With hope,
Swathi Narashiman
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