During the Summer of 2021, I interned at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory as a Radio Frequency Technology Intern (MITLL). MIT Lincoln Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security [MITLL Linkedin]. They are part of MIT that is run on an air force base in Lexington, MA and sponsored by the DoD. This was y first internship and what made me want to pursue grad school.

At MITLL I was working in the Advanced Technology department on a join transmit and receive radar, i.e transceiver. I had never worked on hardware before so for the first 2 weeks I was researching the capabilities of transceivers and reading recent papers. This research was a continuation of another interns work, so luckily I wasn’t starting from scratch. My job was to test the theory of simultaneous transmit and receive. Can the same device send a signal and pick one up at the same time? I mostly conducted my test using finite impulse reposes filters and test signals in MATLAB.

I had originally wanted to do a research internship because I was considering going into academia. Although I learned a lot from this experience and was excited about the work, the pacing of research made me look more towards industry. Still, at the research institute I was surround by academics, some that were even my peers. Here is where I learned about the GEM Fellowship and was inspired to apply. Seeing people that looked like me further their education was the motivation I needed to say ‘I can do this too’.