As I woke up on the last day of my internship at NB Power, a feeling similar to the one I felt at the end of Shad Valley hit me once again. I realized that an amazing learning opportunity and truly rewarding experience was about to end. When I arrived at NB Power’s head office, I was greeted by the security personnel and wished a good day. I took the elevator to the fourth floor and proceeded to my cubicle where my supervisor was waiting to thank me for all my hard work. During my month long work term with NB Power, I was responsible for collecting data concerning various plants’ high pressure feed water heaters. I travelled around the province, taking readings and monitoring the heating systems. After gathering a sufficient amount of data, I conducted heat balances to determine whether the overall performance of the heaters had changed over the past few months.

My first task on my last day was finalizing all of the work I had completed; I reviewed my findings by making sure that my spreadsheets had the correct information and my summary reports accurately described the data’s relationship to both past statistics and the design specifications. When I finished going through my results, I converted the summaries to PDFs, scanned my calculations and sent them to my supervisor and other NB Power employees who would benefit from my work.

The time I spent at NB Power was genuinely unforgettable and it allowed me to learn more than I ever imagined about the engineering world. Shad Valley and this internship gave me the tools to recognize all of my strengths with which I was and will be able to succeed in all my endeavors. For this and many other things, I am very grateful.

Alex Pupek
Hometown: Fredericton, NB

Today was my second last day at Christie Digital Systems, a company that builds projectors. I do not have a specific job description per say, but rather I am assigned to help anywhere needed. What I liked most was how much freedom I was allowed. My supervisor would say: “Here is the problem...” and give me a brief description on a real, serious problem that the company is facing and then I would research, design, implement and write a short report on the solution/test I had prepared to solve this problem.

I was never limited to time, budget or other constraints and could do whatever I wanted as long as it was justifiable. I have worked with gigantic thermal chambers for a battery cold test I had designed, to evaluating and solving thermal and airflow issues on $1 500 printed circuit boards, down to solving how to make $1.50 temperature sensors more robust.

I have worked with almost every aspect of engineering and this job has showed me what each has to offer. Christie has allowed me to expand on my creativity and problem solving skills in a real world setting and gave me significant hands-on experience.

Filip Rangelov
Hometown: Waterloo, ON

My internship is at Sierra Wireless, an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) of wireless networking modules. I started the day by working on a project document with a fellow Shad intern, Zamyla. After a brief research period, we began appending the information to the comprehensive project document that encompassed the work we had done so far. Our project goal was to plan the development of a new testing procedure.

Shortly afterward, my colleague and I were invited to sit in on a conference call between Sierra Wireless and one of its clients. We observed as our project manager handled the various product issue concerns the client was experiencing. The experience allowed us to observe the different stages of work that contribute to the release of a single module into the market. It seems that every time we are exposed to a new experience, we see the project in a new light, allowing us to further refine our project documentation.

While work on the project document was challenging at times, I’ve learned a lot about product development workflows and the strong need for extensive planning in any project. I’m extremely grateful for the kindness and friendliness of everyone during my internship.

Jared Ng
Hometown: Port Moody, BC

Ring! Ring! Ring! Boom! My alarm wakes me for a fantastic day at work. Off I go to Fredericton downtown, feeling grown up and very businesslike when I walk into that big shiny building with "NB Power" on the outside.

NB Power, my employer for my internship, provides electrical power to most of New Brunswick. My co-workers are cool designer guys who stand out in a workplace environment. Instead of a quiet office where all you hear is complete silence, with keyboard tapping, our office has a different feel, and we always have music, use balance balls as chairs, and we joke around while ensuring we complete all our design projects on time. I am loving this job and am hoping I will be able to work here again in the future as a Shad alumni. I've learned so much about design tools on a Mac, and indeed I am a much better Photoshop designer than I used to be. I’m proud of the Photoshop designs I have created, the poster layouts that I have done, and the other work I have completed.

Although the team is professional, dedicated and productive, they know how to have fun. At lunch we often do crazy and different things, because as the saying goes "try something new every day". Today was "Skateboardin' Day" for the crew. After a hard morning’s work, we had a skateboard photo shoot at lunch break - we headed to a skate park and got loads of wicked pictures. When we got back we edited a few and made the best skate photo out of all our wipe outs.

This was a very memorable work experience, because of the fantastic and talented people I work with. I learned many things from these great people in a span of only four weeks, which is incredible. I hate saying goodbye to my job and my co-workers on Friday, and I’m a bit dismayed that I have to leave and go back to another long school year. I hope to have a chance to work with them again in the future.

Jeffrey Wo
Hometown: Hanwell, NB

After taking the bus to Edmonton’s downtown core, I arrived at my workplace, the Alberta Advanced Education and Technology office. Having interned there for almost a month, the thought of leaving the place at the end of the day struck a sad note. Of course, that feeling was also encouraged by the beginning of school looming ever nearer!

I had a presentation that afternoon, so I worked on putting the finishing touches on my presentation. The presentation was detailing my summer internship assignment. For my project, I was given a database, and I was to undertake further analysis on it based on several parameters. I was introduced to SPSS and PASW Statistics, statistical software that enables users to deliver clear and accurate results. My project was to analyze the information in the database and do some data abstraction, importing, recoding and entry. It was a very interesting project and one in which I was able to exercise my analytical processes and acquire many transferable skills.

The presentation went wonderfully and we were all treated with delicious nachos and homemade salsa. For dessert, we had equally scrumptious apple strudel! I had an amazing experience this August working with many delightful people! I am very thankful to Shad Valley for providing me with this wonderful opportunity.

At the end of the day, I thought to myself, that this was definitely not the end; this summer was just the kick start of many wonderful experiences to come.

Shivani Upadhyaya
Hometown: Edmonton, AB

My Shad internship is at Vancity. On Friday, I was at my desk, diligently finishing my final assignment, as it was the last day of my internship experience with Vancity’s Web User Experience team.

I was filled with pride, while I added the finishing touches to a directory of Insurance Specialists for Vancity’s member-facing website. Even with my lack of experience with websites, through these five weeks I grew familiar with the intricate system content management and helped my co-workers create a useful and accessible resource for Vancity members.

After I submitted my final masterpiece, a legacy of my internship, I sat back, looked around the familiar office, and typed up an email for the WUE team as farewell. It was an enjoyable five weeks not only because of what I learned, but also because of the exceptional people that make up the Vancity team.

Helena Cao
Hometown: Burnaby, BC

Vancity Team in "dramatic scene" photo
taken by Helena Cao

I arrived at TD Tower today at 8:30am and after a short ride up the elevator I was sitting at my desk waiting for my computer to load up. I had some time to check my emails, I had only a few, and they were notifying me of upcoming meetings. By 9:00am I was in the test lab and starting my day's testing of the latest version of TD Bank Financial Group's C3 software. This software is used by financial advisors to aid customers with financial decisions and creating accounts. I began this day testing the create account portion of the C3 program in the French language looking for errors.

By lunch time, I had gone through 24 scripts testing that portion of C3 and had submitted 8 defect reports. These defect reports outlined problems that I found in the program based on the scripts I was following. The errors I found included a case where French and Spanish characters were not accepted in the description of account entry field, and also I was able to find a spelling mistake on one of the pages within the C3 program. After lunch I continued to test the same portion of C3, this time I found a fewer errors. I went through 31 more scripts and only found small errors within the scripts I was following.

5:00pm soon rolled around, time for me to head home. I’m excited to see what I discover in the C3 program for tomorrow. This internship has allowed me to better understand the time and effort it takes to commercialize a product such as C3 and the amount of programming that goes into such a product.

Brendan Santyr
Hometown: London, ON