LINK Internship
Animas High School offers a unique program to their juniors. Leading Internships for New Knowledge (LINK) sends juniors on three week internships in the field of their choice. Juniors have to find a mentor as well as finding a place to stay. During LINK, students have no classes as they spend 30-40 hours a week with mentors in the workplace, learning how to apply skills outside the classroom.
More information at ahsinternships.weebly.com. |
Business description
My internship was at Colorado School of Mines, I was helping a professor create a new tool for his students to use in class. I chose this internship because I am interested in perusing electrical engineering as a career.
information about Colorado School of Mines can be found here:https://www.mines.edu/ |
Preparation and Anticipation
Post #1 10/9/19 Fall
To start preparing for LINK (Leading Internships for New Knowledge) I am starting to compile a list of people that I might be interested to have an internship with. Along with a list of interesting environments that I could do in a a job then I will combine the two list with matching ideals to create a new list of possible businesses to have an internship with. After that I did a total revamp of my resume and I started sending emails to people I was interested in doing an internship with.
Post #2 1/13/20 Winter
Right now for the LINK internship process I have found a mentor and contacted them. What I am doing right now is filling out all of the paper work necessary to finalize this internship. What I have to do next is find housing close enough to commute between my internship and the place I am staying.
Post #3 4/9/20 Spring
Due to Covid - 19 my internship has switched to being remote. Every thing is finalized and ready to go I am going to be working on creating a live graph program written in Python code that takes data from an Arduino.
Reflection
I learned that a lot of the real world is doing something the most efficient way possible, for example instead of write all of the code from scratch I used code that other people have written. This is important because there is no real reason to make something from scratch when the same results can be gained in half the time. However this presented some interesting challenges such as understanding code that I have not learned yet. To get over this challenge I learned to not look at the code it self but more what it does and its relationship with the program. Because my internship was remote I was primarily doing software engineering which through this experience I learned that I don't want this to be my career I would rather something more involved in building. My next steps will be writing essays to apply to colleges with engineering majors.
My Project
My project was to write a python program that will have a GUI (graphical user interface) interact with data coming in through a serial port from an Arduino. From the GUI you would be able to send the Arduino commands in the form of strings (letters/words), integers (whole numbers), and floats (real numbers) to control different aspects of the Arduino. The GUI can also plot the data and record it which will save as a CSV file.
|