Meet Archit Sharma, who got into the Google AI Residency Fellowship with no work-ex in 2018 and has been a fellow for over two years. He graduated with a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering and a Minors in Machine Learning and Linguistic Theory from IIT-Kanpur in 2018. During his summers, he spent his time as a Research Intern at Texas A&M University and the Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms (MILA), delving deep into machine learning. In this video, he talks about the application process, the ways you can prepare yourself, the myths around AI residencies, and the perks with it.
Have you always been wondering what it takes to get an AI role at FAANG in India? Leave that, how about getting a FAANG role at their headquarters in California? If you think that the H1B has just dampened every hope you had, we feel you! As an Indian, there are only three kinds of people who get there. 1. You should be an IITian/BITSian/NITian or any Tier-1ian. And out of the 7 people selected from the 5000 0f your batch, only one makes it to the main campus. 2. Or you could first get into FAANG India (you still need to be a Tier-1 grad), and after 3-5 years try to make your way for an internal transfer. But, the headquarters should have a strong reason to hire you over an American citizen. 3. Or go for an MS in those US universities where the FAANGs have set up their career fairs, but again, that’s a long shot.
So, what’s another way? AI Residency Fellowships. Since the past few years, all the coveted companies, have launched one-year fellowships that are open to graduates/ working professionals across the world. It doesn’t matter whether you are an IIT-ian or not, or whether you have a B.Tech or PhD, if you can clear their interviews, you could get in!
The biggest takeaways:
- As a Google AI Residency Fellow, you are on internship period for around 18 months which you can easily extend!
- Being on an intern/J1 visa saved him from all the F1 international students crisis and the current H1B crackdown.
- His internship stipend is almost equal to what an entry level job is at Google.
- The 18-month internship can easily turn to a full-time job!