Host Organisation: Eurotherm (Schneider Electric)
Year Completed: 1st year of the MEng engineering course.
Have you carried out any previous summer work?
I had previously carried out a summer internship at Eurogroup, one of the main producers of rotors and stators for electric cars. It was interesting to go from the company that produces rotors and stators to the one that installs the entire system which controls and records the production itself.
Host organisation name, location, total number of employees, perks of the job?
For my second summer internship, I worked as a Project Application Engineer at Eurotherm (Schneider Electric), where I was a member of the engineering office. My team consisted of around 20 people whose specialization was mainly in informatics and electrical engineering.
What does the organisation do?
Eurotherm is specialized in machine automation efficiency and regulatory compliance. It provides several companies around the world with power and temperature controllers and recorders which register the progress of the industrial production.
Tell us what you want to do careers-wise once you graduate?
I am interested in the applications of my engineering skills for developing vehicles with the highest possible efficiency. I also love solving challenges, understanding companies and their structure, hence consultancy is another path that I may be interested in following.
List 5 things you learned from your internship and touch on aspects you particularly enjoyed/found challenging.
I learnt how to apply several topics that I had covered in the electrical side of the engineering course. Digital circuits, in particular, is a quite difficult topic to visualize and fully comprehend, and the internship didn’t just show me how it’s at the basis of every industrial process but also how it can be seen as a simplification of many more topics not covered at school. I managed to see the correlation between informatics and some, very different, engineering disciplines. I saw the entire evolution of the product, from its creation to its installation and the interaction with the client in this period of time. I realized that sometimes when you enter a work environment you have to switch mentality, start from scratch and learn that every single person can teach you something new. I rediscovered the importance of asking for help, especially when you have just arrived and know less than everyone else; everyone will do his best to help you.
How have you chosen the internship and has it helped shape any future plans?
One of my dreams is to work for one of the main car producers, however I think that it is very important, before stepping into these realities, to have a clear idea of what is behind what the company does: How it receives the different parts before assemblying them, how the production is carried out and how the software controls how it’s proceeding. I think that this internship, combined with my previous one, gave me a better understanding of this concept.
How have you found the internship and how have the Industrial Placements team helped you during your time at Cambridge?
The Industrial Placements team was vey useful, especially in this period when it is very difficult to identify and select an internship. It gave me the names of some of the best companies located in the UK. Because of the pandemic I looked for internships close to where I live (Milan) and found out that one of the companies in the Cambridge list had a subsidiary company in Italy and decided to go there.
What has been the most useful thing for you?
In this 2021, the pandemic has limited all social contacts and the vast majority of the engineering experiments has been carried out online. At Eurotherm, I have finally been able to see some of the topics covered during the year from a practical point of view, work on it with my own hands and ask for the help of the more experienced colleagues.