Hi, my name is Bhavesh Garg, and I am in my senior year in the Electrical department. Also, I am in the dual degree program with a specialization in 'Communication and Signal Processing', a point which you'll see makes a lot of difference in the intern season. This article is about my experience as an intern at Qualcomm in the summer'20, including the pre-intern and WFH skills. I would try to keep this article short and adequate as I know you would be reading a lot of other 'internship experiences' too.

Pre-internship
Before the start of the intern season, I was pretty sure about the kind of work that I wanted to do: Image processing with preferably a machine learning component in it. However, I knew not a lot of software companies that were open to profiles like this, and my best shot would be the first month of the intern season, August. Also, knowing that data structures and algorithms were not my forte, I had doubts about ever clearing the programming round and thus was prepared to apply for univ—research interns.
Qualcomm opened its profiles, both software and hardware at around the end of 2nd week. I knew Qualcomm worked with smartphone camera systems, and therefore I applied for the software profile, even though the description nowhere mentioned image processing. Qualcomm is very popular among electrical engineering students. Thus a lot of students showed up for its first round, which consisted of some fundamental programming questions based on C++ (no DSA) and math and logical reasoning (all MCQs). The shortlisted students went through 2 rounds of interviews, first technical and then a very short HR round. My technical interview was taken by one of the directors of engineering at Qualcomm, who is also an alumnus of IIT Bombay. The questions that I was asked were:

The traditional question - 'Tell me about yourself.'
My sophomore summer internship experience
My favorite course (which was image processing) and why I liked it
(2-3) questions on basic image processing
(2-3) questions on C/C++

The interview results were declared by midnight, and the dual degrees formed a clear majority of the selections. I was selected for the software profile.

Internship experience
I hadn't asked my recruiter about the kind of profile I would get, if selected, at the time of my interview and thus spent the pre-intern months in a dilemma. Fast forward to late April, Qualcomm decided to start our virtual internship from the first week of May. I was assigned with the camera systems team, and sure my project was in image processing with deep learning, as I had wished.
The title of my project was 'HDR image processing with deep learning'. HDR imaging is a very current and hot research topic in image processing. The project was more on research lines, and I was expected to read and understand research papers related to the topic and implement them and then try to come up with deep learning approaches to match/outperform the state-of-the-art models.
On a typical working day, I would be reading and exploring the literature for my project, implementing deep learning models in python (using PyTorch framework), and taking afternoon naps while my model was training. I had bi-weekly meetings with my team- my mentor, manager, and three other employees of the same team, where they would analyze my image results and suggest some methods/ improvements that I could try. Also, there was a mid-term presentation and review with some of the directors and VPs at Qualcomm (including my recruiter).

WFH experience
Work-from-home had its own merits and (a lot of) demerits. I surely missed out on experiencing the corporate culture, living in and exploring Hyderabad and its food, and also the 'travel and accommodation' benefit which Qualcomm provides to its interns. Also, it was difficult to keep my days productive since my bed was just beside my work set up, and my mom loves cooking (eat->sleep). The only merit I can mention is that I could choose my working hours and need not explain them to anyone (except my parents).

Post internship
This internship, apart from helping me develop my image processing/computer vision skills, helped me answer one of my burning questions: corporate or research after May 2022, my graduation. The project being in line with my interests certainly helped me in making this decision.
Only one parting advice from me for your intern season: do not be bewitched by the stipend offered by a company. In a lot of cases, the stipend may not be very high (most electrical core companies, including Qualcomm) but the quality of the projects will be very good. Thus, try to keep your profile your priority instead of signing up for an intern for the sake of its 2-month stipend. That's it, Best of Luck, :).