It’s finally back-to-school season, and the “How was your summer question” is at its peak on campus. This is the part where I say. “If I had a dollar for everytime someone has asked me about my summer…”, but I am not going there.
So, I have a prepared line that summarizes my summer in 5 words, India, Singapore, Internship, singing lessons, and yoga.
I visited my grandmother and my extended family in India. There was good food, beautiful scenery, and great conversations. I was also able to meet my friends in Singapore when I had a 1 day lay-over in the journey from The US to India. Reconnecting with my friends and learning more about their experiences in college was such a joy.
After returning to Texas from my trip, I interned at a Fiber Glass Manufacturing company. I was able to learn so much about the Electrical Engineering side of manufacturing. I used specialized software like AutoCAD Electrical to update existing drawings of the system and digitize drawings. As an engineering intern, I learned a great deal about design. And design affects every facet of your job. The design of your machine, the safety considerations and mechanisms, the accessibility of your design, the functionality of your machine. As I sit here writing my summer reflection, I can’t help but think that design is such an instrumental part of our life, and an important part of my job as an STA at UT Austin! As I design websites, I think about the accessibility of the website (thank you past STA’s for your training), the functionality of the website, and of course how secure is a website. These are considerations that govern how we make choices. What I learned from my engineering internship is that, design thinking is applicable everywhere –– from engineering to web-design to even our life.