A few tips for Ph.D. students at CSCW/UIST interested in industry internships based on some questions I ask directly or indirectly and the rationale behind them. Some things might generalize to other research labs:
#CSCW2020 #UIST2020

Q1. If you have to pick, would you prefer to focus on building systems or studying how people use them?
Some people tend to do everything, but I'm mainly trying to map your interests/skills to our existing projects/quadrants when asking this.
See: https://twitter.com/andresmh/status/1311809318656913410

Q2. What do you want to get out of the internship?
Mainly trying to figure out how we can help you with your long-term career goals. Examples: publication, explore new area/method, work on existing products, build new product/prototype, gain engineering experience, etc.

Q3. What are two or three projects you'd be interested in working on in the ~3 months you'll be with our team?
This is like coming up with the abstract/title of a project. Mainly see how you think about research and understand how you see your work intersecting with ours.

The challenge with the last question is that previous publications don't map perfectly to ongoing/future work due to the delay in publication cycles.
Here are the 3 research initiatives our team is focused on for 2021 (papers about might come out at CHI '21, pending R2's mood)

A. Co-located AR: how do we create technologies that foster, rather than detract from, in-person interactions? Special interest in strong ties + playfulness.
Recent interns who worked on this: @elldagan @sycynliu @anamcard.
Building on @AnhongGuo's https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3351241

B. Glasses-first AR interactions: what new forms of social interactions are enabled through AR when people are apart? @rajan_vaish and @BrianHCI are leading this effort and recently hosted interns to work on this, including @kyungjun_l @HemantSurale @FakePaperclips @tarynnitupp

C. Sociable biosignals: how to enable more intimate and authentic interactions among dyads leveraging wearable sensors? @fanniefliu is leading this, and we do have a paper about an early version of these ideas https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3314405 Recent intern: http://cjpark.xyz 

Overall, the HCI team focuses on supporting social presence, both in-person and remote—special interest in playful and creative interactions among strong ties.

We also have a computational social science research group (emphasis on the computational part) that often takes interns from the HCI community. For example, @nickmvincent, @kous2v, and @dgzara worked/are working with @mbos on an exciting behavioral science project.

Feel free to reach out to any of us for more details and connect with former interns to see how their experience was. Snap has interns year-round. Apply! http://research.snap.com 

(Correction: Maarten's handle is @maartenwbos)