Insight article
Focus Valeria S Experience As An Intern At Shearwater
1 Sep 2021
INTERNAL FOCUS | Valeria’s Experience as an intern at Shearwater
Story from Valeria, Software Engineer InternshipHøvik - Summer 2021
When making any academic or career choices, I have always chosen what I truly enjoy. Therefore, being fond of mathematics and physics, studying engineering was a natural path for me. As a result, I am about to start on the final year of my master’s in Mechanical Engineering at NTNU.
Throughout university, I developed another interest – programming. This has led me to specialize in Robotics and automation as well as explore data science topics such as machine learning and computer vision. This love for programming started in second year, where I had my first encounter with an Arduino in a project course in which we built a self-driving robot. Ever since then, I realized that this is what I want to work with and have continued to work on the robot alongside my studies.
I got the position as a summer intern after being invited to an interview in response to an application. My intern project is to develop a plotting application in Qt4 that is to be integrated with Shearwater’s current software. Although I have had several introductory object-oriented programming courses, the learning curve has been steep. This is something I am very grateful for, as I am already noticing a colossal improvement in my programming skills. It has been exciting to see how a professional software team works as it is guaranteed to improve my collaboration skills in the future. I have also found that my co-workers are very approachable if I need help with anything.
As a mechanical engineer leaning heavily towards programming, I am very glad that I have gotten the opportunity to see if this career path is right for me. The internship at Shearwater has helped me consolidate my technical engineering skills and confirm that programming is something I really enjoy. It is also great to be given responsibility from day one and develop something that will actually be used by others at Shearwater. Overall, it has been a great experience to use my knowledge from university to solve a real-life engineering problem, which is exactly what I would like to be doing in the future.
Valeria interned at the Høvik office, Summer 2021