F....igh...T!!!

Well the time gap between my last post and this one explains it all :).To begin with if i could have kept count of my nightouts in this yr till now, then maybe atleast it could serve as a guidance to my juniors who are ambitious of Foriegn internship and is seriously a measure of the amount of frustration that one have to undergo during this process. For those who wanted to be involved in this kinda process i would only say " Be prepared for everything!!...you might be successful within a week or it can eat up the whole two semesters ".one of my wingies have became frustrated on just watching me continously for a week and gave me a single advise-"Get a LIFE Dude!!".I hope that explains to some extent.

The process began like this. I have contacted many seniors regarding the information on how and when to mail the professors abroad.I had undergone numerous funda sessions for this after which i was too desperate to land in a very good offer. The first and foremost thing that one have to take care is to write a very good cover letter. It must communicate your interests and willingness to pursue a decent project. At the very onset choosing the field of interest is little bit tough job. In my case its a confused altercation between structural and transportation. I couldnt actually decide which field to choose. I picked up randomly and sent the mails in a very random manner. This is infact obviously wrong thing to do. Unless one sticks to a single topic , he/she will face tough time while writing the resume or cover letter . The whole process will be disorganised.After the topic or field is chosen then comes the main part where a lot of hard work and he/she should be patient enough to search for the appropriate universities and the profs' web pages. The best resource that i have found is www.findaschool.org where all the univiersities and institutes are listed according to the country. The first task is the completion of the possible universities/countries that were listed in this site. One could get a count of 400-500 at the near completion. If you are lucky enough you could land with a very good offer even though one could not count on only one resource. If you are unlucky then proceed to the journal sites where search option is available. you can search for all the published papers in the last 5-6 years in the chosen field. Clicking on the abstract will get you the authors contact information, just copy the id and mail him. There are as well many numerous resources like searching for the research groups , ranking sites, etc.. The mail should be sent within a specified time depending on the location. For ex: in case of europe you can start mailing after around 1 pm. The reason is that the profs so many requests or mails and his inbox will be completely piled up with such kinda mails. There might be a high probability that he wont read your request. So if you mail him during the office hours , the request will be fresh in his inbox. The other major problem with europe is that you need a translator to translate the webpages. For this www.google.com/translate is one of the best options or one could go for babelfish by altavista.com . This is the whole process very briefly and there might be exceptions as well. Finally i couldnt be successful even after i had kept enuf fight..a bunch of 1100 mails that are there in my gmail account. My last two hopes are the offers from France and china..well lets see god forbid i might be offered a decent intern next year...My present thoughts are completely undecided , confused and frustrated..sometimes i felt like as is the whole fight is wasted :(