What internships have you taken part in?
I didn’t do the Co-op program, but I have done internships. My first year, I worked at this company called Allegiant 3D. I was a contractor on one specific project. We built a super accurate two-axis positioning rig for a sensor that was going to test tons of high density laser diode matrices. This past year, I worked at a company called ArtyPac. They make and sell the machines that package, well, almost everything. I worked on trying to modernize some of their older machines with some newer equipment, add some features and improve performance.
This summer, I’m going to work at Tesla, which is really exciting. It turns out that one of the judges at our Formula competition last year was a Tesla guy. I guess he liked my work because after I finished presenting, he offered me an internship at the headquarters in California. I’ll be working in the powertrain firmware integration department which handles the process of adding new features to the powertrain. If there’s a new feature that they want to add to the cars that somebody has come up with, our job is to figure out all the systems that would need to be modified for this new feature to exist, and what the modifications would be. Then we load the new software into a car, and test it. We find bugs and fix them. It’s right in my wheelhouse, which is great.
Any advice for people just starting out in the program?
Join a society, for sure. There’s a student society for everybody, regardless of what your interests are. It’s what makes the difference between an engineer that knows only the course material when they go out into the workforce, never having applied it -- and engineers who have applied everything that they have learned in class – and more – to an actual project. Most importantly, joining a student society teaches you how to deal with failure – which is definitely something you’ll encounter in the industry.