NASA JPL Internship - Interview and the first week

🎙 Interview

I applied for both summer and an year long internships but only heard back regarding an year long (APX) internship.

• One interview, 30 minutes with three other people
• Got an email asking if I was still interested

🙋🏻‍♀️ Questions I was asked

The interview was more focused on personal questions, mainly about my resume.

• About one of my projects

  • Explain how and why you did this project
  • They asked if it was a part of school project and if I did it in team or by myself.

• About the classes I'm taking

  • What classes are you taking?
  • What classes did you like and why?

• Why do you want to work at JPL?

• What is the most familiar programming language among the languages on your resume?

📌 All photos on this post were allowed to upload.

🗓 First week

I'm not supposed to write things that our team does in detail, so I'm just going to briefly go through my schedule of the first week.

✔ Mon

On the first day, I had to spend most of the time creating a badge (ID card) and going on a tour following the given schedule. Even though I'm an intern, I was considered as a regular employee since I was an year round intern. I went on a tour with other employees. It was so thrilled to see and be in places that were shown on news.

✔ Tue

I got my laptop for work. I was able to choose the one I want to use among the things on the list. I got Macbook Pro 16" M1 Max. Yes, I got my laptop... but I couldn't do anything with it. JPL locked it, so I had to get my laptop set up to actually use it. I'm in the "GNSS And Signals Of Opportunity Flight Instruments" team. One of my team member brought me to our lab building and showed me around.

✔ Wed

I somehow got my laptop setup. It was scheduled on Friday, but luckily the staff was able to fit me into the schedule. Then, I did online trainings.

✔ Thu

My team member showed me the clean room. I learned how I should use equipments properly. Team members were mostly following "3 days in person 2 days at home" schedule. So all meetings were on Webex. I was on the meeting, observing how other members work.

✔ Fri

Finally, I got to see what I'm going to be working on. I was so excited (and nervous at the same time) to work with these talented people and to work on cool projects.

💭 Thoughts after the first week

It took a whole week to get an idea of what I'm going to be doing for now. The first week was slow-paced. (My supervisor wasn't on lab since he was in different state. That could be one of the reasons.) I think I will be able to know how the work is acutally going to be next week.