Work
The work during the internship revolved around the implementation of key deep learning concepts. I trained and deployed a custom YOLO26 detector on Raspberry Pi 5 with Hailo-8 acceleration, then extended it into a face-recognition and voice-verified access control system. The work ranged all the way from setting up the working system, preparing the custom dataset and experimenting with different data augmentations and types, to training multiple models on versions of the data and establishing key differentiating metrics that eventually helped select the best model for the access control system. The control system was one with provisions to enrol multiple faces into a pipeline that could identify the individual’s identity using facial and voice recognition. The confirmation led to the same YOLO26 object detector that in the end, fed into an inventory log keeping tab of the object’s movement in and out of the inventory. Owing to the layered workflow of the project, no single debug ever felt final. Solving one problem consistently surfaced the next, deeper one waiting beneath it. Debugging pipelines that ran cleanly but silently produced wrong results taught me something no course ever did, that real engineering means verifying your own assumptions at every single stage. This internship pushed me to solve open-ended problems independently, on advanced hardware, in a new country, and it left me with more than just a working system. It gave me a mindset for edge AI and embedded engineering that I’ll carry into everything I build next.
Experience
What makes an IAESTE internship so special is that you walk into a foreign land, for the very first time but with a lovely family that you’re already a part of. The internship experience was truly one for the books. Every weekend I was able to pack my bags and travel, to cities, lakes, mountains, beaches and so much more. My experience was amplified by the incredible support of my fellow IAESTE colleagues, committee members and interns who hosted me in their cities and showed me around town. The opportunity to learn about a place’s history and culture from the people who own it, is truly very rewarding. My work city, Zittau being at the trisection of three countries provided me with an incredible pathway to travel and explore beyond and above. Testing out new cuisines, booking travel tickets at the last moment and picking up fridge magnets from every corner of the continent became a routine during the internship, making the experience beyond professional and truly holistic.
Discover
What inspired me the most was interacting and meeting new people, people from completely different countries, backgrounds, and ways of thinking about problems, all working alongside me toward the same goal. It reminded me that research isn’t a solitary pursuit. Every breakthrough I had was shaped by a conversation, a suggestion, or just watching someone else approach a problem differently than I would have. The internship also taught me a kind of hard work and resilience a classroom simply can’t teach. More than anything, it gave me a real sense of the practical importance of what we’ve been studying. Concepts that felt abstract in a lecture hall such as model architectures, quantisation and edge deployment, suddenly had to actually work, on real hardware and in real time. That shift from theory to something that had to function in the physical world changed how seriously I take my coursework now. I don’t just want to understand a concept anymore. I want to know what happens when I actually try to build it.
