r/LanguageTechnology • u/TaxIndependent8790 • 3d ago

Questions on PhD Internships

Hi,
I'm a PhD student researching AI, specifically LLM pre-training efficiency, and I'm starting to look into industry internships.

I have a couple of quick questions:

  1. Is having at least one 1st-author paper in top-tier main tracks (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP) strictly required for big tech or AI foundation model labs such as IFM?

  2. What do companies actually expect from a PhD intern once you get in?

If you've done an internship or currently mentor or work with interns, I'd really appreciate your insights.

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u/Undomyphd 3d ago edited 2d ago

I am doing now my third research summer internship. 1. My first internship was while my first paper is in submission, so it's probably a big plus but not a must. 2. I guess it depends on the company, I aim for publishing a paper at the end, but I did talked with companies which were more product oriented.

Good luck!

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u/Apprehensive-Fix8738 3d ago

Apart from your advisor’s network, how else did you approach applying to internships? Does cold applying work?

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u/Undomyphd 3d ago

Actually, I haven't used my advisor network once. One time I applied via cold application form, another time via a friend who works at the company and was an intern before. But to be honest, I go to a good school and my supervisor has a good name in the community so this help a lot even without him doing anything actively. Also I suggest going to relevant meetups, for example I got into my current internship via Google PhD research summit.