This summer we ran our largest internship program yet at UnifyID. We hosted an immensely talented group of 16 interns who joined us for 3 months, and there was never a dull day! While bringing in interns for the summer does create an energetic cadence, fresh viewpoints challenge us to grow as a company too. 12 weeks can feel like both a sprint and marathon, but in start-up days, even the hour can be precious.
Almost all our interns mentioned a desire to contribute to the technology of the future when asked why they chose to work at UnifyID, and we think this is a testament to the quality of our internship program—interns are able to contribute their talents in a meaningful way, whether on our machine learning, software engineering, or product teams.
Our machine learning interns focused on research, under the guidance of Vinay Prabhu. Much of their work has been on figuring out how to integrate new factors into our algorithms or develop datasets of human activity for future use. Three of our paper submissions were accepted to ICML workshops to be held in Sydney this year. This brings the total number of peer reviewed research papers accepted or published by UnifyID in the last few weeks to seven! What is especially exciting is the fact that these were the first peer-reviewed papers for our undergraduate interns in what we hope will be long and fruitful research careers.
Our software engineering interns have been integral in supporting our product sprints, which have been centered around deploying initial versions of our technology to our partners quickly. As one of our interns, Joy, said: “From mobile development to server work to DevOps, I learned an insane amount from this incredible team.”
Our product interns were involved across teams and worked on projects varying from product backlog grooming and retrospectives to beta community management to content marketing to analyst relations to technical recruiting to team building efforts. Having worked across multiple facets of the business, they were able to wear many hats and learn a great deal about product development and operations.
Aside from work, there’s no shortage of events to attend in the Bay Area, from informal ones like Corgi Con or After Dark Thursday Nights at the Exploratorium, to events focused on professional development like Internpalooza or a Q&A with Ben Horowitz of a16z, who provided his advice on how to succeed in the tech world. Our interns were also able to take part in shaping our team culture: designing custom t-shirts, going on team picnics, and participating in interoffice competitions and hackathons.
Though we are sad to see them go, we know that they all have a bright future ahead of them and are so grateful for the time they were able to spend at our company this summer. Thank you to the Summer 2017 class of UnifyID interns!
- Mohannad Abu Nassar, senior, MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
- Divyansh Agarwal, junior, UC Berkeley, Computer Science and Statistics
- Michael Chien, sophomore, UC Berkeley, Environmental Economics and Policy
- Pascal Gendron, 4th year, Université de Sherbrooke, Electrical Engineering
- Peter Griggs, junior, MIT, Computer Science
- Aditya Kotak, sophomore, UC Berkeley, Computer Science and Economics
- Francesca Ledesma, junior, UC Berkeley, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
- Nikhil Mehta, senior, Purdue, Computer Science
- Edgar Minasyan, senior, MIT, Computer Science and Math
- Vasilis Oikonomou, junior, UC Berkeley, Computer Science and Statistics
- Joy Tang, junior, UC Berkeley, Computer Science
- Issac Wang, junior, UC San Diego, Computer Science
- Eric Zhang, junior, UC San Diego, Computer Engineering
