Industry Experience

I worked at WNA Engineering in Pittsburgh, PA as an Electrical Engineering Intern.

During my time at WNA, I worked closely with an electrical engineer. I was able to learn how to use AutoCAD and Revit to design the lighting and power layouts for commercial construction buildings. An important part of this was using the programs to do lighting calculations to ensure that the area would have adequate lighting. I was also able to design fire alarm layouts and emergency egress lighting as well as project design details.

Going into my internship, I had very little experience with any type of programming that electrical engineers use in the field, and now I am confident when using both AutoCAD and Revit. I also learned a lot about the different building codes that ensure everything is up to the energy standards. The most important thing that I learned this summer is how to work very well with engineers of different disciplines. I worked with both mechanical (HVAC) and plumbing engineers.

If you are struggling to figure out what you want to do after college, try internships within different areas of your major. It is just as important to figure out what you don't want to do.

I worked at GE Transportation, A Wabtec Company (known just as Wabtec) as an Additive Manufacturing Engineer.

During my time at Wabtec, I oversaw three different lab spaces: the Innovation Lab, the Maker's Lab, and the Additive Lab. The Innovation Lab was a space that housed smaller FDM polymer printers and was a space where engineers on other teams at the plant could send their models to me and I would print them. The Maker's Lab was a space with multiple tools and machine for prototpying (i.e. sanders, laser cutters, CNC machining, hand tools, etc). The Additive Lab housed the additive manufacturing specific printers, most notably was a stainless-steel DMLM printer. I was responsible for the upkeep of these machines and maintaining proper workflow for incoming print requests.

I learned a ton while working at Wabtec. Not only did I learn about additive manufacturing, as well as the way the printers worked, but I learned just how versatile engineering is. As an intern, I had to wear many different hats. One moment I was a Polymer Engineering, the next I was working as a Mechanical Engineering building battery modules, and the next I was working as a Manager writing Manufacturing Instructions, and further I was a Sales Engineer, speaking on the value of these labs spaces to executives. Being an engineer does not restrict what you can do, but rather attests to your ability to be flexible, quick on your feet, and practical, utilizing your core technical knowledge with interpersonal and communication abilities.

Be open to new experiences! Chance is, as an engineer you will be involved with many individuals doing a wide range of work, so your major may not be a strong part of your work. Most importantly, know that being able (and open) to learning new skills and techniques quickly is a key way to succeed in engineering!

I worked at GE Healthcare as a Software Engineering Intern.

I worked closely with another intern and a development team of 8-10 people. I was assigned a mentor who I met with daily to work on different tasks and a manager who I met with weekly to check in on my progress. My team was a part of a global project for refactoring code for their MRI machine as it had a lot of legacy code, making it hard to add new features. I specifically worked on updating the code to the latest Spring Boot and Gradle libraries.

This was my first ever internship so it was my first experience in industry. I became familiar with the new technologies and tools I was introduced to and learned how a software development team works in an Agile environment.

You will get in as much as you put out. If you do not have any work to do at a given time, talk with your peers and learn about the work they do or read about the different tools your team uses. Be a sponge! Soak up information and ask questions.

Anika Washburn, Computer Science

I worked at Microsoft as a Software Engineering Explore Intern and Software Engineering Intern.

Summer 2020 (Explore Intern): I worked closely with another intern and created a PowerShell user interface for the Azure Storage Capacity Management team to speed up a previously tedious process of changing build versions for Azure tenants. The team was in charge of making sure Azure tenants (where the cloud storage accounts are held) never exceeded 80% capacity. If they were close to reaching capacity, the team's automated tools would migrate some accounts to other tenants. Once we finished the first project, we identified Azure storage accounts that need to use certain migration techniques and published them to a new table using C#.

Summer 2021 (SWE Intern): As a member of the Azure Storage Configuration team, I reduced the build time of the team's repository by refactoring the code and implementing parallelization. I implemented a solution to prevent future drift in setting values across Azure tenants by modifying an R script to work in our specific environment.

Being remote, it is very important to communicate effectively with your co-workers so you do not get stuck on something for an extended period of time. I realized how important it was to schedule meetings with my mentor/manager to keep them up-to-date and to prepare questions whenever I met with them. I established relationships on more of a personal level with my team which made work more enjoyable as I was more connected with my team.

If you are a freshman or sophomore, look for opportunities that are geared towards first/second year students (the Microsoft Explore Program is specifically for these students). It is hard to land an internship early on, but these programs help you get your foot in the door and open up further opportunities.

I co-oped at Curriculum Associates as a Software Engineering Co-op.

I worked very closely with a development team to complete backend, quality assurance, user interface, and SQL tasks to improve the functionality of an internal program that allows employees to help customers with any issues experienced on our main teaching/guidance platform called i-Ready.

The people you work with are extremely important. I got along well with my mentor and manager so it made my experience phenomenal. The culture and community aspects of company play a large role in your happiness as an employee.

Even if you don't love an experience, it is still great that you had the experience. Within computer science, as well as many other fields, there are so  many sub-fields to choose from. Keep trying them out to see where you fit best!

Anika Washburn, Computer Science