Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) is known worldwide. “We applied, and I was fortunate enough to receive three months of supplemental funding from NSF for an internship at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP from September through November,” said Chhabra. The application process included a two-page summary of the proposed internship, a student resume, a letter of collaboration from the host organization, and a letter from the principal investigator requesting the supplemental funding. In May 2017, the NSF posted a letter offering funding to graduate students seeking nonacademic research internships. “The focus of my research is on viewing design as a sequential decision process (SDP) and using reinforcement learning to alleviate the cognitive burden on designers with respect to selecting models to evaluate designs,” said Chhabra. Under the supervision of Gordon Warn, associate professor of civil engineering, Chhabra began working on a National Science Foundation (NSF) project titled, “A Sequential Decision Framework Support Trade Space Exploration of Multi-Hazard Resilient and Sustainable Building Design.” – Internship experience can be an invaluable part of education, and no one knows that more than civil engineering doctoral candidate Jaskanwal Chhabra, who spent the fall semester at one of the leading architecture, interior design and engineering firms in the world.Īfter receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, Chhabra came to Penn State in 2014 to begin his doctoral research.

Civil engineering internship