What's it like to work at In-Q-Tel?

Transcript

[Music] [Music] my name is akshay gupta and i'm a summer intern on the investment team hi i'm madeline and i'm the marketing and communications intern at iqt my name is david and i'm an intern for the field technology practice my name is bethan saunders and i'm the intern on the strategic issues team here at inkytel my name is harry kaden i am the i.t systems operations intern my name is kate joe i'm a data science intern at iqt labs my name is mike mcgetrick and i am a summer associate with iqt international hi i'm rishi i am the intern with the agency partnerships team i'm really interested in blending my experience in finance and my passion and interest in national security so inquitel really brought together everything i was looking for focus on investing a very clear and important mission and also i'm getting exposure to so much interesting technology and being able to think about those issues in the context of national security policy so it really was a perfect blend for me and i was such a great summer and i got to learn a lot of new things and really see the application of my interests from school in the real world iqt is a very unique place it might be one of the few places in which everyone is aligned on a singular mission and that's a wonderful environment and somewhere i thought i could really do well learn and grow i chose iqt for my summer internship because i was interested in strengthening my data science skills and specifically interested in exploring projects related to applying machine learning to real physical systems and additionally i was also interested in getting exposure to and kind of contributing to the open source community as well and seeing how impactful open source technology is yeah so i really want to highlight getting to work on the iqt podcast that's been a super fun project for me that i've gotten to take a really big role in and it's something that i actually brought up in my interview process and so it was really nice to see that something that i expressed interest in early on was really taken to heart and they really let me like take such a big role in the planning and the production of it and it's been great to kind of see it come together like start to finish it's been really interesting i've been working on doing a global competitive analysis on nuclear fusion so that's been really interesting a technology area i wouldn't have otherwise dived into and then i know we're also doing a my my team and people on my team are doing a lot on semiconductor manufacturing i've been working on it's asset management automation project i've really been the main force driving force behind it so one project that i've been working on is the frontier nation project and what this has been doing is kind of mapping out the different venture and startup ecosystems across the united states and the goal of this is to kind of help utel diversify their funding outside of silicon valley and into states where traditionally there's not as much venture funding the way that inquitel takes like a full architectural approach on um the different technologies that the government needs is i think really interesting to me so i thought i had a lot of exposure to what's going on around the globe and i realized that there is a lot of tech out there that's extremely exciting that i had never been exposed to before i think something else that's really important about iqt is bringing in diverse perspectives to an area that typically hasn't had a lot of disruption so besides the bi-weekly lunches my favorite part about iqt is the exposure and [Music] the people honestly this is a place where there's people so many different backgrounds and so many different life experiences and talking to them and understanding their experiences is really really cool a typical day involves a lot of team interaction creating materials to go to our customers and partners planning the podcast sometimes getting to have really cool conversations with other people that work here that come from super different professional backgrounds so every day is a little bit different but always really exciting typically i come in the morning and i work on just helping people with it issues whether it be making sure their devices are working for them properly or you know checking if all of our conference rooms are up and running properly and taking care of imaging devices for travel or for new hires or just with general device upgrades for for our employees so i'm working on a project exploring the use of radio frequency signals to detect and classify devices and my typical day mostly involves building and testing machine learning models for the project i also attend meetings to discuss with my team on the progress of these models as well as plan for next steps and this summer i also got the chance to get some hands-on experience to build up one of the hardware platforms that's used to collect the data i'm working with i would just say talk to everybody here because there are so many people who come from so many interesting jobs whether you're into like the technical side or startups or like policy research there are so many people who have so many interesting experiences and so i and and even for me like i'm going into the air force i got to talk to um people who have worked with the air force and their um kind of acquisition strategy so yeah just whatever you're interested in take advantage of the knowledge get ready to drink a lot of coffee the people here are the best part to make sure you grab coffee with everyone and anyone everyone has a unique experience and a perspective and it'll be one of the best things that you can do just to put time on people's calendars and get to know everyone for any potential mba candidate for either the international role or on the domestic investment team it's a great opportunity to learn not only about venture capital but also about the defense industry and really understanding the nuances of getting tech from the private sector into government [Music] is is it rolling thank you i practice no i didn't [Music] nailed it