Apple Interns,  Employees, and Trainers

We have a long-standing tradition of BSc, MSc, and PhD students from our lab being invited to work at Apple's development headquarters in Silicon Valley as interns. These internships usually take place during the summer and last for several months, and quite a few of these have led to our alumni continuing to work at Apple as engineers, developers, and managers. We also frequently have students winning scholarships to Apple's annual WWDC event, and several PhD students who have become Apple Certified Trainers.

Rumor has it that our graduates have been doing so well at Apple that, these days, new candidates from our lab often get recruited directly from project teams at Apple, rather than going through the standard application process.

This tradition started with Eric Lee, who was a PhD student at our lab from 2003 to 2007. He wrote his PhD thesis about new models of time in software frameworks for interactive media playback, which grew out of his work on our Personal Orchestra conducting exhibit. He worked at Apple as a summer intern during his PhD years, and then continued there after completing his PhD at our lab. He has been back at RWTH several times over the years and shared some of his experiences at Apple — as far as he is allowed to, of course.

Nils Beck, who did an MSc in HCI at Georgia Tech, worked at our lab as a student assistant in 2007, and has been working at Apple since then.

Stefan Hafeneger worked on Multitouch frameworks and tangibles on tabletops at our lab as a student assistant, then wrote his Diploma thesis about the BendDesk in 2011, and, after interning with Apple, joined Apple as a regular employee.

Thorsten Karrer wrote his Diploma thesis about time-stretching audio at our lab, and continued to do his PhD with us about semantic navigation in digital media, which he completed in 2015. During his PhD years, he worked as an intern for Apple several times.

Marty Pye wrote his BSc thesis on midair interaction, and his MSc thesis on interactive statistics tools, both at our lab, worked as a student assistant at our lab in between, and moved on to work for Apple in October 2015.

Moritz Wittenhagen completed his PhD thesis on new ways to navigate source code at our lab in 2016, and has since been working at Apple.

As of 2018, Simon Voelker and Philipp Wacker are Apple Certified Trainers for App Development with Swift 4.

Sven Titgemeyer, after writing his Bachelor's thesis on “Protoyping an on-demand routing app with location-based content push” at our lab, was invited for an internship at Apple in the summer of 2019.

Christian Cherek completed his PhD thesis on tangibles on multitouch tabletops at our lab. He did an internship at Apple in the summer of 2019.

As of 2020, Sebastian Hueber is Apple Certified Trainer for App Development.

More information (internal access)