Students travel overseas for summer engineering internship program

For computer science senior Hannah Clay, a recent internship experience in Singapore confirmed her desire to work in biotechnology.

Last summer, Clay participated in the Stanford School of Engineering’s Global Engineering Internship (GEI) Program, which pairs undergraduate, coterm, and graduate students with tech companies overseas for a summer work experience. Clay was matched with Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (known as A*STAR) to work on coding a website about an artificial intelligence model.

“It was my first time working at a research institute, and I got to learn some new skills related to web development,” Clay said. “I have a big interest in biotech, so it was very cool to be in that space surrounded by cutting-edge biotech research.”

For the 18th year, the GEI program will continue in 2025 to jointly fund internship opportunities in locations that include China, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Mauritius and Turkey are new options for this summer. Stanford students can apply to GEI and rank their top three host companies, which include Advance Intelligence, Cyberport, Infosys, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Stanford funds the travel and the host company funds a local living stipend.

While there are numerous engineering internships in Stanford’s San Francisco Bay Area backyard, the GEI program can be ideal for students who want to build internship work experience while also getting to travel and live abroad, said Ming Luo, associate director for Global Engineering Programs at Stanford Engineering.

“We want students to have the opportunity to work in a culturally diverse, international environment, where they get an immersive experience handling projects at a local company, while also seeing how people work and live in that region,” Luo said. “It’s important for engineering students to understand as a global citizen how other parts of the world function and that living in the U.S. or Silicon Valley is not the only possibility.”

Since the GEI program’s inception in 2008, at least 235 Stanford students have participated. The program has aimed to build students’ exposure to other cultural contexts outside what they get on campus in the U.S. That life and work experience translates well to post-Stanford careers, according to Pamela Hinds, faculty director for Global Engineering Programs and chair of the Department of Management Science and Engineering. 

“Students may eventually work in or lead teams just down the street from Stanford that are globally distributed and reflect different cultures,” Hinds said. “So it’s really important to have some kind of exposure to cultures and languages that are very different from our own, in order to more effectively navigate those kinds of situations.”

That was a benefit for Ryan Dwyer, who recently graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s in computer science with a focus on AI. Dwyer, who also earned an East Asian studies minor, was a software engineering intern at KPIT in Pune, India, during the summer of 2023.

“For me, it was about making memories and getting a much better understanding of interacting with people and cultures. You can find yourself in your Stanford bubble, and also in your Silicon Valley, California, and America bubbles, where you don’t have conceptualizations of what other people are going through politically and economically, as well as what it looks like to overcome language barriers,” Dwyer said. “I built up a lot of soft skills that I don’t think many other people are going to have to the extent that I do because of the [GEI] program.”

At the Indian company, Dwyer worked on applying large language model technology to issues in the automotive sector. He worked with colleagues in English but was also exposed to some Hindi and Marathi. Dwyer also liked that he could easily travel by plane, bus, or train to see other cities across India.

“By doing an internship while you’re in this very new, different place, you don’t have to sacrifice a summer of travel and you don’t have to intern in a traditional American engineering workplace,” Dwyer said. “You get to see how people of different cultures think about technical problems differently.”

That exposure has given Clay the confidence to expand where she might later work in the biotech industry. “I got to meet a lot of very interesting people from very different backgrounds,” said Clay, who practiced Mandarin and the language’s regional dialect in Singapore. “It might be a scarier option with the lack of information, but now, having lived in another country, I could see myself moving and working abroad for a few years.”

Bioengineering junior Allison Zhang appreciated the exposure the program in Hong Kong gave her in both her professional and personal lives. In 2024, she interned at Gense, a startup biotech company, where her work included working on clinical trials with older patients who mainly spoke Cantonese. Zhang’s parents are originally from the south of China where Cantonese is spoken.

“I thought it would be a really interesting experience to not only get exposed to work in the biotech field, but to also get some life experience and to broaden my horizons abroad,” Zhang said. “It’s a really incredible feeling when the language that you speak only with your family back home in America is suddenly spoken by everyone around you. I really enjoyed meeting new people wherever I could, and everyone felt like family in a way.”

In addition to picking up medical terminology in Cantonese through her clinical trials work, Zhang liked that working at a startup allowed her to do many things, including hands-on exposure to user experience testing and user interface design. The startup, which focuses on medical devices for chronic disease monitoring, also provided good exposure to this field, Zhang said.

“I was lucky enough to have really, really incredible mentorship throughout the experience because I was working directly with the co-founder and CEO of the startup,” Zhang said.

Zhang is planning on medical school after Stanford and says the GEI experience inspired her to think more about how the biotech industry can collaborate with hospitals and physicians.

“[The program] has given me a longer range of vision for where the things that I’m learning become applicable in real-life scenarios and in industry,” Zhang added. “Advocating for the patients and their health conditions and medical needs was something that I took from this that I want to fulfill in the future.”