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Ask HN: Bioengineering Undergrad trouble finding internship

3 points by vortexh ↗ HN
Hello everyone, I'm at a dead end here and feel that I'm unable to find an internship that will provide me with something I'm interested in.<p>I'm currently majoring in bioengineering in which the vast majority of my skills come from data acquisition and analysis. I can use R and Matlab to run statistics and I've also implemented various training methods in the realm of neural networks. The problem I'm having concerns my inability to find a paid internship that actually interests me.<p>Can someone provide me with advice or last minute advice? I really need to have something for the summer and it would be a huge disappointment if I'm lazy bum during my junior year summer.

4 comments

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fnbr
Let me know if you find something. I'm in a similar boat, honors math undergrad, work experience with R/Matlab/Python, Incanter contributor, and I'm currently submitting a paper for publication in ICSME 2014 on machine learning, but I can't find an internship.

It seems like there's no interest if you're not a comp sci/software engineering student. All the people I've talked to want significant experience, even for an internship position (Stripe, for one data point).

vortexh
Will do. If I was an EE, I would have a decent chance at finding something because it's a fairly specialized field. Same with CS. You tend to pick up skills and are much more valuable in the long run for your ability to program. I'm neither of those and now I'm seriously regretting this major. I seem to be a jack of all trades guy and that is making me concerned about my future. I'm not a software engineer so I can't exactly create large scale software with good coding skills and I'm not a hardware person either. I have some experience with arduino but that's baby stuff compared to what these internships work on.

I'm very sad and extremely concerned. I have worked on neural networks and stuff but I neither have the experience nor the necessary knowledge to work with, say, Microsoft Research Group.

fnbr
I'm sorry that no one replied... That's really shitty. I would have thought that for sure someone would have known of some opportunity available for you.

I agree with you though, there seems to be nothing out there.

psyklic
Assuming you are in the US, try applying to national laboratories such as Los Alamos/Lawrence Livermore/etc. Many offer bioengineering-related internships on the regular search portion of their "jobs/careers" site, and they often get few applicants.