I even managed to attend Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference at Apple Park and check out the latest Apple technology.
In June 2022, while still in San Francisco, I began thinking about what my next co-op would look like. At the time, I was doing on-campus research with Professor Gene Cooperman. I was enjoying my time in San Francisco traveling to different places and working on challenging problems, and I was looking for my next co-op to be similar. I wanted to go abroad, and when I mentioned this to Professor Cooperman, it just so happened that he had lived in Toulouse for a couple years and knew a colleague looking for interns in France! After jumping through some administrative hurdles and figuring out the logistics of moving to an unfamiliar city in France, off to Rennes I went!
That colleague was Professor Martin Quinson, and in January 2023, I started my internship at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Systèmes Aléatoires (Instutute for Research in Computer Science and Random Systems or IRISA) Lab. The IRISA is one of France’s largest and oldest computer science labs with around 800 researchers, doctorates and faculty working there year-round. The IRISA Lab shares space with another organization called the Institut National de Recherche en Sciences et Technologies du Numérique (also know as Inria, or the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology). Inria is one of France’s primary national institutes of science and technology, employing around 4,000 scientists.
