How does an internship help us grow?

Over the summer, I was able to get a taster for what the working world of engineering is. Working at a start-up research and design company was a very eye-opening experience. In this article, I would like to share some of the insights I gained from participating in this internship.

Importance of curiosity and creativity

A big takeaway from this internship was the necessity for curiosity and the creativity to solve problems. The essence of engineering is essentially to create a physical solution to solve a problem. When us interns first came to the company, we thought that a very fancy, grand, sophisticated robotics idea would be very suiting for the issues that our boss has set for us to solve. However, the best solution may not always be the most complicated. Instead, our boss would often urge is to get inspired by mechanisms and processes that are in day to day objects because it would therefore be simple, easy to build and replicate, which ultimately meant that we knew that I would work and that it was a solution that would work. Therefore, when we actually thought of any ideas to add mechanisms to put into our solutions and potential robots are free what we essentially did was me we went to IKEA had to basically find out different mechanisms, or just utilize day-to-day objects such as a lunchboxes to actually get inspired. This prompted me to think that our knowledge of how day-to-day things work and knowledge in different fields can all link back to engineering or our respective, specific fields. This further prompted me to think that acquiring knowledge from many different fields could still have used in one singular field. The constant need to design and think of mechanisms appeared to me that the need for creativity is quite abundant. Furthermore, I was given the task of having to draw some CAD to represent the ideas, and I truly believe that with drawing CAD requires quite a lot of logic as well as creativity in order to draw the object that you would want.

Meeting People

Through this internship, I had the pleasure of meeting many very gifted and talented people in all sorts of areas. Due to the fact that we are colleagues, we are almost forced to approach them and interact with them. Often times, this leads to a tight knit friendship that I think is quite invaluable. I believe that having good communication and social skills is very important as well. During the pandemic, for myself at least, My social skills have potentially declined due to the fact that we have all been locked in and advised to not go out all that much. In turn, I have seen that there may be less face to face communication. This can potentially hinder the possibilities for networking, which could mean the loss of more fun and exciting opportunities and projects ahead, or even fascinating lessons to learn from other people. Hence, I would say that it’s still very important to interact with other people and truly be confident with speaking with even complete strangers.