Dalia El Badawy, Communication Systems

Last year I took a semester off to do a 6-month internship at Technicolor in France. I was fully immersed in the company and I felt like a regular employee. Apart from the daily work, I attended presentations and saw demos of other people's really interesting work and I also gave presentations on my internship work. I helped to draft patent disclosures as a co-inventor, which is pretty awesome; and being a research-oriented internship, my supervisors and I published two conference papers from the work done. These are really valuable experiences to have before graduating and I recommend taking the time to do a long internship.

It's also really interesting to travel abroad and live among different cultures. For instance, I found it especially amusing to compare the lunch hour traditions in the French culture (lunch more-than-one-hour) with the Swiss culture (lunch half-hour)!

Finally, it is worth noting that at Technicolor they have a best intern award. So you get a chance to compete and see how you compare with your peers across the board from different universities around the world. You can guess who won (hint: EPFL FTW! and I got to meet the CEO!).