I'm a pre final year dual degree student at an engineering institute in India with placements coming up next semester. I have a decision to make about this summer.
Option A — Industry internship:
FPGA Engineer intern at a small HFT trading firm. 20k/month stipend but requires relocation to another city. The team is very small, no senior FPGA engineers to guide, just one quant guy working with FPGAs since a couple of months, and the work is purely FPGA/trading infrastructure.
Option B — Stay in college:
Edit: This project also involves people working with EDA tools at Synopsys who were phd students of the professor I am working with.
Continue a research project with a professor (LLM for RTL generation, 10k/month). Do my own FPGA projects he has ultrascale boards, College has Synopsys tools available and I could spend time going through a proper RTL to GDSII flow on my own projects — synthesis, STA, placement and route. Net money after expenses is roughly the same as Option A.