Employer Testimonials

I have hosted two interns through the IAESTE program so far during the summers of 2004 and 2005, and both experiences have been extremely positive. My first intern, Jens Kaufann, from Wunstorf, Germany, worked with two CMU undergraduate students developing microcontroller code to support experiments in our embedded systems laboratory. My second intern, Patrick Dolan, from Belfast, Northern Ireland, worked with two CMU graduate students implementing a demonstration for a wireless sensor network research project. Both Jens and Patrick made significant contributions to our projects and were a lot of fun to work with.

I attribute the success of these internships to the IAESTE program. Hiring an IAESTE intern is not unlike hiring a CMU student to work on a project. The IAESTE application form asks for the type of background and skills the intern should have (including language skills), and where the intern should be from (what countries or general part of the world). IAESTE then looks for prospective interns that meet the criteria and sends their applications for review and approval. In both 2004 and 2005, I declined to accept their first proposal, and they promptly looked for more possibilities.

Once an intern is selected, the national IAESTE office takes care of all the details of arranging the intern’s visa and itinerary, and our local student chapter takes care of all the local arrangements. This means that hiring the IAESTE intern really is the same as hiring a CMU student in terms of the details I had to take care of. Of course, I had to provide the salary (similar to what I would pay a CMU student with the same background), and I had to provide the project and everything needed to work on the project—a lab and computers and other equipment—just like I would do with a CMU student. This means that the only substantive difference between hiring an IAESTE student and a CMU student was the $600 fee charged by the IAESTE program.

In my opinion, the $600 was well spent. Not only did I have excellent interns who contributed significantly to projects in my laboratory, my students and I had the enriching experience of working with students from other countries. The varied backgrounds and perspectives that Jens and Patrick brought to our lab provided new insights on many fronts, including technical insights. Moreover, I know that my hosting of interns at CMU made it possible for CMU students to go to other countries as interns for similarly rewarding experiences.

I have been very happy with James's work and with my first experience of hiring an IAESTE intern. James has been very productive and will leave us with a rich legacy of programming work that will benefit our project.

James Lanagan has done an excellent job for me in programming dynamic query sliders, double caching strategies for thumbnail imagery, and other filtering interfaces for the Informedia interface that we hope to put in place for future video retrieval research and international evaluation forums such as the NIST TRECVID Video Retrieval Evaluation forum .

I was very happy with Drazen Gurovic who worked with us during the summer of '06. The selection process was good in that even though the first person suggested to me didn't fit the background needed, the selection people figured out the type of background I was looking for and found a person with a great fit (Drazen).

I have had 2 IAESTE students thus far. I have been consistently impressed by their ability, resourcefulness and self-motivation.

I have overall positive experience with both the IAESTE process for hiring students and with the specific students working with me, and I plan to continue participating in this program.

Tomasz is an outstanding student. He fit into our research group very well and contributed with his work to our team. I was very fortunate to have him in my team and would recommend him any time. My experience with IAESTE was very positive and I am planing to host another intern this year.