The internship programme at NeuroSYS is a win-win for both interns and us as a company. Students have to learn something new and apply their knowledge in practice. We – make interesting discoveries, learn generational differences, and simply get a big portion of inspiration and creativity from youth.
And as it became a nice tradition to sit down and discuss our summer internship programme takeaways over a steaming cup of tea every fall, let us share some of this year highlights with you:
The idea behind or how we create a supportive work environment for interns at NeuroSYS
We aim to help young people develop their creativity, problem-solving skills, ability to work effectively as a team, learn new things quickly, be flexible but carry out responsibilities. At NeuroSYS they have an opportunity to work with the latest exciting tech (artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, IoT, AWS…) and hardware (MS Hololens, Festo Motion Terminal, a robot arm, an IoT platform, a deep-learning robot etc.).
Our interns choose what kind of project they want to work on within the topics of our professional domain. Often their goals are too ambitious for a 2-months project. The problems they want to solve have no existing solution, no tips on GitHub, even no experts in the field to help them with it. But isn’t that what real-world challenges look like?
We don’t expect our interns to deliver a perfectly working market-ready solution within 2 months. This is hardly feasible even for professionals. What we care about is the process and what they get from it: how they deal with critical problems? how effective is the cooperation within the teams? What are the lessons they learn in the end? This way we can discover young talents, test new technology’s limits and get inspired by our interns’ creativity and ideas.
That’s why we give our interns space and independence in exploring new technology possibilities. They go through the whole cycle of product development (from brainstorming on the idea, analysing business needs to its actual implementation) and can try different roles.
From our side, we provide full organisational support. There are professional project managers who introduce students to Scrum and help organise their work effectively, as well as specialists from various fields who are always ready to help.
You can read more about our internship concept and why we don’t ask students to do typical interns tasks or do pair programming here.
Meet the interns’ team of 2019 and their various exciting projects
This year we were lucky to host 16 talented students in our offices in Wrocław and Białystok:
Wrocław interns’ team and their IoT Solution
(Wrocław interns team with their PM)
Our interns in Wrocław got involved in industrial IoT. They came up with various exciting project ideas within this topic, but one was an obvious winner – the AR application for industry that allows engineers to monitor the production environment, the state of machinery, and prevent breakage. The valve terminal (Festo) connected to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and powered by machine learning algorithms would be the basis of this app.
Interns in Wrocław decided to work in three groups. One group took care of sensor configuration on the valve terminal, collecting data in real-time from and transferring it to AWS. The other group visualized the data by creating a mobile application. And the third group tried to assess the equipment state and predict potential breakdowns based on collected data using deep learning latest technologies through researching and applying best practices of predictive maintenance.
The project brought many challenges and its proper realization is hardly feasible even for qualified specialists working full time. However, our interns managed to show impressive results and presented working solutions for critical problems. Besides creating the fully working Unity-based AR app, they found a better solution while working with Greengrass and AWS (AWS support considered that and updated their documentation accordingly) and developed a companion mobile app in Swift. We cannot be more proud!
(App in action)
Białystok interns’ team and their foosball automation solution
(Białystok interns bringing our playroom to the new level)
Who said that tech and IT are for businesses only and cannot be used to solve our daily struggles? Six talented interns who joined our office in Białystok proved the opposite.
Their challenge was to upgrade the existing foosball match-maker bot with manual buttons and tablet application. Now our lucky colleagues in Białystok live ahead of their time: they can signal a goal and end their foosball match simply by touching the button. The game results are counted automatically and can be monitored via the tablet app.
(Solution architecture)
Besides the neat technical solution, our interns also conducted market and user research, predicted all possible user scenarios, analysed competitors’ solutions available on the market… – in one word dealt with a problem like a pro. Our standing ovations to them!
Testimonials
No one can sum up the project better than the actual participants:
[article-quote name=”Jakub Bachusz” position=”Univeristy of Wroclaw” image=”” content=”I loved the idea of working in a team with people that pursue the same goal. It creates a perfect atmosphere where everyone motivates each other.” /]
[article-quote name=”Michał Adamski” position=”Wroclaw University of Technology” image=”” content=”I liked the climate and the relaxed atmosphere. And the air conditioning this season was salutary! No pressure, rational requirements and a lot of freedom! This internship gave me the possibility to work on a large project that is mentored by professionals. I cannot imagine learning Scrum project management at the university or via online tutorials.” /]
[article-quote name=”Igor Zatoń” position=”Wroclaw University of Technology” image=”” content=”I liked the organization and working conditions. I learned how to program microcontrollers in C, the basics of working with AWS IoT Cloud and saw what work in IT company looks like.” /]
We want to thank all the interns and wish them all the best in their further career. We are sad it’s all over, but we are sure our roads will cross in the future 😉 Traditionally students who have displayed special diligence got an offer and chose to join the NeuroSYS team as permanent employees (whoop-whoop!).
Find out more about meaningful engagement in tech and how we implement it in one of our previous blog posts.
If you are interested in our future internships – stay tuned or drop a line to our recruitment team: rekrutacja@neurosys.com. For more information on how it is to work with us and all the actual internship positions / job offers (IT work in Wrocław and Białystok) – check our career page.
