The understated struggles of international students

Last August 2023, I started applying for software engineering internships around the US—apparently, I was already late to the “game”. My peers have already been applying since the start of the summer. I got demoralized—it was not the best news to receive. But I continued since I’ve already set my mind. They said it was normal to apply to more than 50 companies—so I did. However, chances were so slim, rejections piled up, as expected. What was unusual was that my rejection email was sent 5 minutes after I submitted my application. It turns out that the company was unable to sponsor me a working visa.

It was an unfortunate pattern of rejection after rejection until finally, I got into the next round. They wanted to interview me. As the company asked the basic “why” questions, my responses did not come naturally to me. I needed to dig deeper. It turns out that the simple question pushed me to see that I’ve gone astray from the college freshman who wanted to have a purposeful and impactful career.

Unfortunately, the reason that first went to my mind when asked was financial stability. I did not want to get kicked out of the US after graduation since my student visa would only let me work if I had a job. It didn’t help that I came from a middle-class family in the Philippines. I wanted to give back as soon as possible to my parents who never got the chance to further their education and experience the world. On the contrary, I did not want to be performative and lie about why I wanted to get the job.

The Fall semester was about to end, and what made it worse was that it felt like everybody was ahead, and there I was, jobless for the next summer.

Others: “Have you interviewed for a SWE internship?”

Ed: “I haven’t. Have you?”

Others: “Yeah, I have three interviews on Friday.”

Others: “Yeah, I already accepted my offer at [*insert a big tech company’s name]”

Intentionally listening to my voice and mine alone

Realizing that the external pressure prevented me from planning my next steps, I had to step back and think about what I actually wanted.

Winter break was the best time to reflect and listen to my thoughts–Duke’s campus was pretty empty and quiet. It was a long three weeks. During this period of silence, I remembered the questions I brought with me when I first set foot on US soil.

How can we use satellite technology to narrow social inequalities and address the climate change phenomenon? How can we implement such existing methods in under-resourced communities?

These are questions that have been lingering in my thoughts since back in the Philippines. For some reason, I, for a short while forgot about them. I took some time to listen to my voice, and to be fair, not a lot of my peers within the ECE department asked these questions. Certainly, a software engineering internship with the big tech companies was not going to help me answer them.

As we all know, climate change has impacted the world in so many ways but more importantly, it has disproportionately affected those communities that contribute the least to the global carbon emissions. ¹ Coming from these communities who can now access state-of-the-art resources, I felt compelled to pursue such an impactful research career. From then on, I started getting serious about planning to go to graduate school to be more involved with the relevant research.

Unfortunately, only a few institutions in the US ask the same questions as myself. Looking through various labs, I have come to notice that only the top universities like MIT and Stanford have labs that work on this niche topic due to their overwhelming amounts of funding and their interdisciplinary and technical nature. Luckily, both universities offer a summer research program for college students.²,³

Quality over quantity

Coming from a mindset of shooting my shot to as many places as possible, I attempted to apply to both. Writing my essays for the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP) was a breeze as unlike those from my internship interview, I almost immediately came up with answers. I particularly liked my discussion of the community which strongly resonates with MIT’s strong tradition of “making a better world”. Said community is my hometown where I spent 18 years of my life. Spending time outside of it made me realize things that I would not have thought of had I stayed. These queries eventually materialized into a long-term project that aims to reveal narratives of disadvantaged communities to those who have the means to initiate change.

The landing page of the project’s website

On the other hand, Stanford’s questions did not come as easy to answer as MIT’s, and more importantly, they had an explicitly mentioned preference toward US citizens which unfortunately is the case for almost all REU programs funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). So I ended up applying to only a single research program.

I would once have thought it was insane to have only applied to a single summer research program—what a gamble my mind intuitively took! But deep inside, I somehow knew that the fit was almost perfect, seeing that the program strongly encourages “students with research interests focusing on underserved populations and understanding issues of inequalities”.

On March 4th, while I was reading some lecture slides before my class started at 10:05 am, I received the acceptance email, a letter that not only gave me the calm from constantly worrying about my summer but also validated my interests not exhibited by a majority of my peers.

Take it slow, be intentional!

If there is one piece of life lesson that I would bring with me forward, it would be the merits of taking things slow. It was the change of pace and intentional silencing of the environment that ultimately led me to pursue something that I wanted. Instead of matching others’ frequencies, I’ve learned that there is a sweet range where I can hear myself and a select group of people who acknowledges my potential.

I guess the next challenge for us is figuring out how to guide one’s self into finding such frequencies. This becomes more crucial in the next few weeks as I start my internship with the other 97 undergraduates participating in MSRP.

Reference: https://www.usglc.org/blog/climate-change-and-the-developing-world-a-disproportionate-impact/ ↩
MIT Summer Research Program: https://oge.mit.edu/msrp/msrp-overview/ ↩
Stanford Undergraduate Research Fellowship: https://engineering.stanford.edu/students-academics/equity-and-inclusion-initiatives/prospective-graduate-programs/summer ↩