Summer Intern Projects

Tekmos makes frequent use of interns, particularly over the summer months. These are college students, majoring in engineering or computing science. The challenge is how to make effective use of a smart, but relatively untrained employee who may only be available for 8 to 10 weeks. Here is how we do it.

Every company has a combination of both low and high priority projects. The high priority projects are customer driven, and all have deadlines. These are not projects for interns. The low priority projects are another matter. Low priority projects are typically for internal use. There is no specific deadline, and they are usually not manned. And so these are what we assign to the interns. If they succeed, then we have solved a problem. If they don’t, then we are no worse off than we were before. Fortunately, we have had a good deal of success with interns, and have been successful every time.

Past projects have included an interface between our tester and our handler that also allowed for a manual start button. Another project involved the use of DSP algorithms for testing a codec circuit. And a third was a test case where we extracted a circuit schematic from a physical layout.

This summer, we have had our two interns, Byron Seaberg and Gavin May, working on a dedicated tester for one of our high-volume parts. We have a handler capable of 7 site testing, but we don’t have a tester to go with it. One of our engineers had put together a schematic, but the resulting board had issues. So, we assigned one intern to hardware problems, and the second intern to software problems. The hardware intern identified several wiring issues on the board where 2.5 volt signals were connected to 3.3 volt flash memories. He corrected the schematic, turned the board, and is now debugging it before he returns back to school (MIT). Our software intern has assisted by writing code to exercise the board, and working on USB protocols to interface the tester with a PC. Again, it is a rush to finish before he returns to school (UC Berkley).

We try to create jobs that will not only benefit us, but will benefit the interns. The main benefit is doing actual engineering work in an engineering environment.  We also try to enhance their experience by letting them participate in engineering design reviews and in manufacturing meetings. This makes the internship a win-win proposition for both of us.