I was fortunate enough to start product and software development from scratch and lot of freedom to design and experiment with different ideas, algorithms & concepts, and collaborate with others to develop the desired final product.
Name: Sudharsan Balasubramani
Major: Robotics
Employer: Kick Robotics (via the Maryland Technology Internship Program)
Location: Bethesda, MD
How did you find your internship position? I found this internship via a posting in the Careers4Engineers portal. The Engineering Career Center helped me tailor my resume and helped me whenever I wanted to apply to a specific job posting with unique requirements. They were immensely helpful and responsive.
What's it like to work during a pandemic? Currently, my internship is remote, so I work from home. It is very casual because of COVID, but we use Slack to communicate. We have group meetings bi-weekly, and keep other teammates apprised of our work. Understanding the goals and objectives of your employer and having good communication are important in this environment.
What was your experience like? It has been a great experience where I was fortunate enough to start product and software development from scratch and lot of freedom to design and experiment with different ideas, algorithms, & concepts and collaborate with others to develop the desired final product. It was rewarding to achieve the result we wanted in the product despite the constraints and challenges we faced.
Are you working on any exciting projects that you want to share? Have you learned any exciting new skills that were unexpected? Kick Robotics has a low-cost, autonomous environmental platform which uses wireless mesh technology to communicate over long distances. I have been involved with developing the software for onboarding and communicating across robots using ZigBee technology. This requires deep understanding of wireless low-bandwidth communication as well as understanding storing our telemetry data in the Redis database system.
How did you prepare for the interview? Can you share any tips for your fellow students? I prepared myself ahead of the interview by thinking about projects that I worked on during my academic life. I spoke about various tasks that I completed and strategies I used when working with a team. During interview, I tried to convey confidence and enthusiasm for the internship role.
My suggestion to fellow students would be to keep learning in your area of interest and prepare yourself well on things that you already know and be thorough with it. This way you can be more confident in your interview process and perform better.
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