My experience

Overview

Did everything I was asked to do. From taking out the trash and cleaning the lab to designing medical tools in Solidworks. Used Instron a lot to perform mechanical tests. Monotonous testing - sometimes spent the whole day just pulling out a screw from sawbone over and over. Used a bandsaw a lot to cut sawbone - hated it because it's dust and I had to be constantly around it. Modified part drawings. One actually cool thing that I did is I was able to use SLA 3D printer to prototype my CAD designs. That was fun. People are okay, but no one ever really talked to me. Sometimes there would be free food when business guests would come into the office, but you would only have the left overs.

The pay is horrible. It starts at $10/hr and increases to $15 and then $20 per rotation. It was super depressing to work in this place, honestly made me really question what am I doing with my life. Everyone seems stressed and depressed for not reason. Fake smiles, fake "how are you" no one from the engineers or the people that suppose to manage you cared at all. There is one weekly meeting where you are given your tasks and their priority. There is a fake sense of you being able to do the projects you want to do, but it's really not the case, you will have to do whatever they want you to do obviously. Did a lot of boring excel work and compiling data. Don't even know if that was useful at all. A lot of busy work for sure. I barely ever received feedback. This was my first ever internship. I was able to learn some new instrumentation but I only performed one rotation because even if they paid better I wouldn't wanna come back to the environment. It's really not worth it. The guy name 'Dave' who you will end up interacting with a lot because you will be spending most of your time in the lab is not friendly at all. Super arrogant and cocky for no reason. "Know it all" type of a person. Is very annoyed when you have a question. And believe me you will have a lot of questions because you don't want to ruin their only testing equipment because obviously they will hate you for it. They really don't offer too much guidance for the work that you are asked to do, but then again how could they when the tasks you are given are tasks they don't want to do. Had to spend so much time cleaning their lab. When I offered advice about how to keep it clean, I was looked at as if I am the idiot there who can't keep a lab clean lol. Don't get me wrong, some people are really nice and sweet there, the machining guys are super cool, but other people are not that friendly. Honestly, there are so many bad things about this company and the way they run their internships that I could write and write and write. If you do decide to intern here, keep in mind that you probably won't get that much feedback at all (I got like two "great job" type feedback) That honestly made me stressed and anxious as I didn't know if I am performing well. My back started hurting because they gave me a broken chair with a broken backrest. I told the HR lady about it. Said my back is hurting. They told me they would order a new chair, and gave me another chair (which wasn't bad), but essentially lied and they never ordered anything.