Hey everyone, 4th year Physics PhD here doing applied ML (surrogate models for fluid dynamics). I’m trying to finalize my summer 2026 internship and I'm totally torn between two offers, mostly because of some digging around I did.
Offer 1: Capital One DSIP. $~13k/month, McLean HQ. Great money, super structured, likely return offer. But I'll be doing tabular data/GBMs for credit risk, which honestly sounds a bit soul-crushing compared to my physics work. Work itself is interesting and I have never done business related work before, but it does sound appealing.
Offer 2: Siemens AI Lab in Princeton. Research intern doing Physics-Informed AI and time-series foundation models. No official paper yet but verbally told it's coming. Pay will definitely be less, but the work is exactly what I do in my PhD.
Here's the problem: I hit up some past researchers from the Siemens lab on LinkedIn. One guy told me the PI is "great, but very aggressive in research and eager to push to industry." Another guy literally replied, "Take Capital One. Personally my experience hasn't been the best" (We are talking tomorrow).
For those of you who have worked in corporate AI labs, does "aggressive in research" usually mean for a toxic, 60-hour publish-or-perish meat grinder? Should I just take the boring finance job for the money and WLB, or is the physics-ML research experience at Siemens worth the potential headache?
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