Summer time! Most students would associate the season with long, hot days, beaches, ice cream parties, and quality time with friends. While I have gotten my fair share of “under the summer sun” time throughout the summer break, most of my summer has been comprised of three things: work, work, work (thank you for giving me a beat to read those words to, Rihanna). Work during the summer doesn’t have to be considered a bad thing, especially when engineering internships give you projects that have you actively engaged and learning.
I spent the first part of my summer finishing up my internship with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which I had first gotten during the spring semester. At JPL, I worked on a safe to mate testing system for deep space cubesats, a system that was produced in the hopes of freeing the time of test engineers by automating the testing of cubesat boards. I spent about a month of summer vacation there, completing all the work I had started during the school year and ending my internship by giving a presentation of my work to the section managers!
After JPL, the majority of my summer was spent at another internship, this time with Facebook as part of their Facebook University program! Facebook University interns are a little bit different than the typical Facebook intern; the program is aimed at first and second year undergraduate students and works to teach interns about mobile development rather than have them work on ongoing Facebook projects. Three weeks are spent actually learning mobile development (Android or IOS) and while the rest of the time is spent working on a big app project in groups of three. My group is in the midst of finishing up our group app and putting on the final touches to get ready for the big app demo we will have during our last week. Alas, my time at Facebook will be coming to an end soon and I’ll be back to hitting the books in a little less than three weeks.
All in all, my summer has been magical and a far cry from whatever I had imagined the summer after my freshman year of college to be like. I’ve managed to already have a taste of what careers in my major have to offer and I am more than a little excited to hopefully be able to explore more of that next summer!
