Internship @ Colorado School of Mines
LINK Internship Description
LINK is a 3 week-long internship that every junior has to complete at Animas High School from April 30 to May 18. The students have to find an internship at a business or institute that is in their interest. Every student is paired with a mentor who is the “teacher” of the student during these three weeks. After the internship, the student presents their experience to a panel of teachers and students.
I did my internship at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. I was working in their robotics lab for the three weeks. The Colorado School of Mines is devoted to engineering and applied sciences, mostly focusing on topics related to Earth, energy, and environment.
Preparation for the Internship
I started looking for internships in the fall of 2017. It was very hard to find a person who would have interest and enough time to be a mentor. I started contacting colleges as there are many of them where they are working on really interesting robotics projects. I believe I heard “no” more than twenty times before I emailed Dr. Andrew Petruska who was happy to give me the opportunity to do my internship at the Colorado School of Mines. I was very excited about this internship because they were working on a project that I thought I will be able to contribute to. I was hoping to bring some new ideas and perspectives to the project they were working on. I was hoping to show the group I was working with that even a passionate high school student can be very useful in the research they were making.
Internship Description
At the Colorado School of Mines, I was working on a robotics project. In this project, the group I was working with was building an autonomously flying drone that can explore underground mines without having humans to go in. The drone monitors key safety metrics such, as O2 levels. This will provide many benefits to the safety and health of underground miners; for example, assessment of the risk of roof falls. Having an autonomous system perform these functions removes humans from these dangerous conditions.
My task in this project was to set up the Time of Flight sensors that will be placed at several places on the drone. Time of Flight sensor are sensors that measure distance by emitting a light beam and then measuring the time to bounce back from the obstacles around the drone. My job was to figure out how the sensors can communicate with the onboard computer of the drone, how to build the circuits that connect the sensors to the computer and write the code that communicates with the drone and translates the read data into actual distance values.
My final product was a C++ class that makes getting distance values from the Time of Flight sensors really easy in the future development of the UAV.
Internship Reflection
The most useful skills that I had, prior going on the internship was that I already had a lot of coding experience although it was mostly in Java and not in C++ which is the coding language I had to use in my internship work. I also knew how to circuits work and how to build them. These two skills made it easy for me to understand what my job will be and how to approach it.
The first challenge that I encountered was that I had to learn how to code in C++, which turned out not to be very hard as I knew Java already. This is also one of the skills I developed during my internship. The most important thing that I learned from my internship is the way how we need to approach engineering problems and the procedure that you need to follow in order to solve the problem that we are facing.
During this three weeks, I learned how the deal with a problem that is first is way over your head and that I should never give up because there is a solution to every problem. This was my biggest takeaway from the internship and it contributed a lot to my personal development.
I feel like I was an important part of the group I was working with as I solved a problem that no one knew how to solve. Going there I thought that I’ll have to do something that the college students would be able to solve in ten minutes but it turned out that they also had no idea on how to make those sensors work.
This internship helped me to create an idea of what kind of projects I will work in college or even after graduating from college. I got to experience college life a little bit and what it means to work on a project full time. It also inspired me to start my own robotics projects in my following two high school years as I saw that high school students can do cool stuff too.
Pictures of My Internship
