Program

The Residency Journey

Residency isn’t simply six months spent at a company. The experience is intentionally structured before, during, and after your internship to help you get more from your time in industry and bring more of it back with you.

1.  Prepare – Build your community and get ready to hit the ground running.
2.  Immerse – Become part of the team—not just another intern.
3.  Develop – Use the experience as an intentional development laboratory.
4.  Integrate – Turn six months of experience into learning you can carry forward.
5.  Return – Come back to MIT with more than industry experience.

1. Prepare – Build your community and get ready to hit the ground running.

• Meet your Residency cohort and connect with GradEL Residency alumni who have been through the experience.
• Participate in a 6–7 week Residency Prep experience focused on preparing you for the transition from MIT to your host organization.
• Set personal development goals and identify the skills, perspectives, and experiences you want to intentionally pursue during your Residency.

2. Immerse – Become part of the team—not just another intern.

• Join your host organization for six months, giving you time to move beyond onboarding and build meaningful relationships with teammates and stakeholders.
• Contribute to real technical work and deliverables as a member of an active engineering team.
• Gain exposure to how technical decisions, tradeoffs, collaboration, and organizational context shape engineering in practice.

3. Develop – Use the experience as an intentional development laboratory.

• Assess how your capabilities are developing and identify areas you want to strengthen.
• Meet one-on-one with a GradEL advisor for coaching on real challenges, opportunities, and development goals.
• Connect with your Residency cohort to compare experiences, learn from one another, and support each other throughout the six months.
• Reflect on what you’re observing about yourself, your team, and how engineering gets done.

4. Integrate – Turn six months of experience into learning you can carry forward.

• Look back on how your skills, perspective, and approach have changed over the course of the Residency.
• Synthesize lessons from your technical work, team experiences, organizational exposure, and coaching.
• Identify what the experience has taught you about the environments, roles, and ways of working in which you thrive.

5. Return – Come back to MIT with more than industry experience.

• Bring new approaches to collaboration, decision-making, and problem-solving back to your research, lab, and project teams.
• Apply a broader understanding of how technical work connects to people, stakeholders, organizations, and impact.
• Return with a clearer sense of how you work best, what motivates you, and where you want to grow next.
• Carry your new skills and perspective forward—whether your path leads to industry, academia, entrepreneurship, or somewhere you haven’t considered yet.