How I landed my IIT Ropar research internship

In the summer of 2025 I spent three months as an NPTEL research intern at IIT Ropar, working under Prof. Sudarshan Iyengar. This is the short version of how I got there, what I built, and what I'd tell anyone trying to land a research internship as an undergrad.

## Getting in

There was no secret referral. I had been taking NPTEL courses seriously, seriously enough to land in the top 5% in Cloud Computing, and when the NPTEL internship applications opened, my course record did the talking.
If you're an undergrad in India, this path is genuinely underrated: learning is completely free — you only pay a minimal exam fee if you want the proctored certificate, and that small investment genuinely boosts your career, because professors actually look at these.

A few days after making the selection list, the official offer letter landed — an 8-week virtual research internship at IIT Ropar, starting May 19, 2025.

## What I built: Query2Map

My project was Query2Map — an AI-powered learning platform that takes a student's natural-language question ("how do I know when to use a heap?") and maps it onto a graph-based ontology of DSA concepts, then serves back a ranked, personalized learning path with curated videos and articles.

The stack: MERN end to end, with Ollama Mistral running the language model locally, NLP for query understanding, and the YouTube + SERP APIs for real time content. I engineered the Express.js API layer and got answer accuracy to 85% against our evaluation set.

## What research taught me that shipping didn't

I came in as someone who shipped products.I left as someone who measures them. In freelance work, "it works" is the finish line. In a research group, "it works" is where the questions start: works compared to what? On which queries does it fail? Why 85% and not 95%? That habit of instrumenting and interrogating everything followed me back into every project since.

## Advice if you want this

• Treat NPTEL courses as a portfolio, not a checkbox rank matters.
• Have one real project you can demo live before you apply.
• In research, write down what you tried and why it failed — your professor cares about the process as much as the result.

## Signed off

Eight weeks later: internship complete, project shipped, certificate in hand.

Try Query2Map live →

## NPTEL Certifications

The coursework that got me here — all Elite-certified, proctored, and verifiable. Click any certificate to zoom.