BMW

German luxury vehicle, sports car, motorcycle and engine manufacturing company.
 

Courses

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Course 6)
Materials Science and Engineering (Course 3)
Mechanical Engineering (Course 2)

Location

Munich

Host Type

Industry

Tags

automotive

BMW Group distributes BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce motor vehicles worldwide, with its headquarters in Munich. The company employees nearly 7,800 people from over 50 nations.

At MIT, BMW works closely with research groups in Materials Science, Mechanical Engineering, CSAIL and many more to create new technologies for the future. The company is currently a member of the Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) at MIT and has hosted dozens of MIT students through MISTI over the past 20 years.

Internships of six months are strongly preferred.

A close partner of MISTI Germany, subsidiary BMW Car IT GmbH is a software company focused on the design and development of innovative software for future BMW Group automobiles and motorbikes. They have hosted a handful of past interns and continually offer exciting projects.

Student Story|Gregory Thiel, MechE PhD '17

Gregory Thiel, MechE PhD '17

Thiel at his new employer in Munich, Germany

As a kid, I remember my father coming back from a business trip, having made a side trip to his mother’s family’s hometown in Germany. He’d taken a picture of the town center: aside from the color, it looked identical to the one my grandmother kept in the family trunk. The town hadn’t changed in nearly a century. The same curiosity that led me to pursue a scientific career had always made me curious about different cultures and ways of thought, but I was especially intrigued about my own cultural roots – what was there, how did it shape my family, the family of so many other Americans, and American culture as a whole?

As I finished my doctoral at MIT, I decided immersion was the only solution strong enough to scratch the itch. I found my pathway at MISTI Germany. Through its extensive network of alums and professional contacts, I heard story upon story – from the logistics of finding apartments and sorting the recyclables to broad ideas about cultural differences.

Most importantly, I also found a job. Since May 2017, I’ve been practicing the thermal engineering fundamentals I learned at MIT to develop cooling systems for BMW in Munich. And next month, on one of the many holiday weekends, I will make the drive to my ancestral hometown to take that picture once again.

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Student Story|Puneeth Meruva, EECS '19

Puneeth Meruva, EECS '19

I worked at BMW for three months as a Software Engineering and Project Management intern. I contributed to a Machine Learning based automation system trained on driver actions to help develop more intuitive BMW vehicle user interfaces. I worked on building an AI-based personal assistant for BMW Vehicles trained on customer assistance patterns and NLP of automotive documentation and evaluating start-ups and new technologies ranging from NLP to Sensor Systems for viability of acquisition or use in BMW technologies.

I feel like MIT prepared me extremely well for this internship. For both the technical and non-technical aspects of my work, I was able to be very productive with the topics I was familiar with and was able to learn very quickly the projects I was unfamiliar with.

The department I worked at was a very international department, so everything was conducted in English and the work culture itself was rather similar to that of an American company. One key difference though was that they valued work-life balance greatly, forced me to take many vacation days, and heavily discouraged working late.

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