HKN Underground Guide to VI-A
Foreword

          Welcome to the twelfth edition of The Underground Guide to VI-A . It is my hope that this guide will provide prospective VI-A students with information about the program that they cannot find anywhere else. Most of what is contained in this guide comes directly from the people who best understand VI-A -- the current VI-A students. Thus, if you do find this guide useful and you are fortunate enough to join the VI-A program, please take care to fill out the surveys that you will receive while you are on assignment. This would greatly help the next generation of students as they face the same decisions.

          The Guide was dramatically improved four years ago and is now available on http://hkn.mit.edu/6Aguide/ with links to the actual companies. Beyond the collected reviews of the participating companies, there are sections which provide outlines, general advice, and comments that all of you will find useful. In addition, we have tried to further improve the guide this year by including a statistics section for each company's summary. The company reviews reflect the results of surveys which were sent out this past summer. A copy of the actual survey has been included to give you insight into how we interpret the students' responses. Though I am relatively happy with the amount of response that I received, it can still be improved. Yes, this is yet another plug for you to please send in your surveys.

          This Guide is always accompanied with a caveat, and this time, it is no different. As you use this Guide, remember that the information herein is an incomplete sample. In many cases, only a small number of people returned the surveys. In fact, some companies have the data about all of their divisions consolidated in one review, and some companies do not appear at all because of the shortage of surveys. However, this is not to say that the Guide is useless -- far from it. You can rely on these reviews to gain a solid first impression of each company, and as you talk more with other people and gather more information, you should be able to form a complete picture. If you believe in a track record, I can certainly tell you that these reviews have almost always been pretty accurate.

          I do hope you find the Guide useful. Again, you can always help simply by spending some time with your company evaluations and returning them. I would certainly appreciate any comments and suggestions, as well. Feel free to drop me a line, and I will pass on whatever you tell me to the editor for next year. The Guide exists to serve the students, and we will be best served if we all participate.

Gina Yip
2000 Underground Guide to VI-A Chair

Acknowledgments

          First, we give great thanks to the students who filled out these surveys and returned them. We would also like to thank Professor Markus Zahn, the director of the VI-A program, and the VI-A office for their active sponsorship, including Lydia, who continued to take the trouble of sending us completed surveys as they were returned. We also have to thank the officers of Eta Kappa Nu for their great support.

Underground Guide Staff

Chair
  • Gina Yip, red_dove@mit.edu
    • Editors
  • Samidh Chakrabarti, samidh@mit.edu
  • Michael Tsai, mjt@mit.edu
    • Writers

  • Sauparna Das, soupaman@mit.edu
  • Edward Keehr, eakeehr@mit.edu
  • Spriya Natarajan, nataraja@mit.edu
  • Andreas Sundquist, asundqui@mit.edu
  • Bill Thies, thies@mit.edu
    • Web Master
  • Jordan Hung, low@mit.edu