Every summer, the School of Computer and Communication Sciences provides internship opportunities as part of the Summer@EPFL program. Places are assigned on merit to students with outstanding academic records. One of these students, Alosius Akonteh, shares his experience with us from the summer 2025 program.
Where are you from and at which university did you study?
I'm from Cameroon and I studied for a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering at Ashesi University in Ghana.
What motivated you to join the Summer@EPFL program?
In my third year of university, I took some courses in digital systems design and computer architecture, and those courses opened my mind and made me realize that a lot of technological development is hinged on foundational concepts in these courses. I was looking for an opportunity that would enable me to gain research experience while working on real projects within those fields and Summer@EPFL was exactly what I was looking for – to research and then work on real-life projects!
Which EPFL Lab did you work with and what project did you work on?
I worked in Professor Paolo Ienne’s Processor Architecture Laboratory (LAP) and the project I was working on was called ‘Dynamatic’ - a dynamic high-level synthesis tool. It basically takes C code and converts it into a hardware description language to bridge the gap between hardware and software development. It's still in development and my responsibilities involved testing the software, finding new bugs, finding things that needed improvement and, where possible, contributing to solving them. And because of that, I had to read a lot of papers and one thing that I realized was that there was so much I didn't know and that excited me because if I don't know it, then I have an opportunity to learn.
What’s the key experience you will take home with you?
I think one major thing I've learnt is that theory is very important. Initially, it's easy to assume that if you're working on a project, you just need to know how to write code but in the end the theory behind it is crucial. I have realized that even though theory is not 100% translatable into practice, it is definitely foundational in order to solve any problem. This has given me a desire to have a deeper understanding of theory so that I can translate it into practice when I'm working on anything.
The Summer@EPFL 2026 application site is now open! To apply, please visit the Summer@EPFL website: https://summer.epfl.ch. The application deadline for all students is the 30th November 2025.