It is so crazy how quickly these last two months have flown by! I spent the last few days in CR finishing up touristy things like taking a “cooking class” where we made empanadas, and taking cheesy pictures by local landmarks. I learned so much throughout my internship and time spent here. The majority of my internship was spent in the research and development of a new catheter system, which was really exciting. I was able to get tons of hands-on experience with the characterization process for building the system. We set parameters for all parts of the fabrication of the device, and created various iterations of the device. We took what we made and tested all of the variants to prove that our methods were successful as well as help decide some final parameters of the build. In the end, we were able to export all of the data gathered and run statistical analysis on data from various steps.
In addition to directly building and developing this system, I was able to help create and improve the work instruction for fabrication. This included transferring everything we did into clear instructions for future technicians, as well as laying out all necessary equipment and parameters. While it was a small and mundane task, it is part of the job and I was happy to get the experience. That in combination with a few other updates and transfer of quality documents will really help me later on in my professional engineering career. The last major task I had was to utilize SolidWorks to help create a fixture for the team to use in later builds of the device. This fixture will (hopefully) help with a current bottleneck in production and allow technicians to work more efficiently. I am excited to see everything I have done this summer contribute to Confluent’s products!
On top of the great internship experience, I had some of the greatest experiences with all of the friends I made in CR. Not only the other students in the program, but being able to meet so many people passing through San Jose and getting to meet such a variety of people from everywhere was so interesting. I will definitely be missing our Selina workers more than I could ever express! They were so good to us and we all had so much fun inside and out of Selina! Oh – and I will also miss our friend Pascal the “stray” Selina cat.
Traveling all around the country and getting to admire the beauty from different areas will be an experience I will never forget! Truly a beautiful country with beautiful people. So sad to leave, but SO happy to be writing for the final time from the comfort of my own home!!