My internship experience was not, entirely, a success. I and my coworker were on a quest to construct an autonomously navigating robot, and while we got very close to a working version, close was all we got. However, I can hardly say that I, or the school, got nothing out of it. For me, this was one of the most intense learning experiences I’ve ever had. We had some oversight, but largely were expected to work things out on our own. We had limited resources in all areas: time, money, knowledge and facilities. In every instance it was up to us to use what we did have to “figure it out,” and the marvelous thing is that most of the time we did. There were many brutal setbacks along the way, both ones that were entirely our faults (such as bad wiring and poor algorithms), and ones that were largely out of our control (such as the constant part failures we experienced), but this taught us to bounce back and press onward.
In reality, this was the pattern of the entire internship. If there were broken parts we simply ordered new ones and pressed on. If the code doesn’t work, just keep tweaking it until it does. If our idea of how to do something is completely flawed, find the issues with the idea and work out a better one. In the end, this is the main lesson I learned from this project. How to work with my partner, starting from almost no knowledge and almost no facilities and to make real progress towards the end goal. In the end, there was no working robot. We ran out of time, and our robot met an untimely end before it could make its first real journey, but it wasn’t for nothing. I and my coworker gained experience in both the technical side of things and in project management and teamwork. The school gained a more well established and documented project for other students to work on in the future. I found the experience deeply rewarding and it fed both my love for analytical thinking and my constant urge to learn new things. It taught me that I could figure this out. And if I can figure this out, why not anything else?
