🦿 Legged & Loaded 🤖
MechE Internship Advice + Cool Legged Robot Startups + Co-Ops
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💼 Hardware Internships - It’s Fall Co-Op Time!!!
It’s too early to recruit for next summer’s internships. However, we would strongly urge you to consider . . . Fall Co-Ops!!! Why do a Co-Op? They are a great way to get more experience, both for your resume and so you can see what it’s like to work somewhere for longer than 12 weeks. Also, they tend to be less competitive to get than summer roles and thus can be an easier way to get your foot in the door at a top company!
Here are some interesting Fall 2023 Co-Ops:
Tesla - Manufacturing Engineering Internship
Tesla - Thermal Test Engineering Internship
Astranis - Radio Hardware Internship
Zipline - Mechanical Engineering Internship
Relativity - Test Engineer Intern - Build & Operations
Anduril Industries - Manufacturing Engineer Co-op - Maritime
Formlabs - Mechanical Engineering Internship
Formlabs - Machine Shop Internship
Want even MORE Co-Ops to apply to? Check out the Hardware Is Hard Mechanical Engineering Job Board!
👶 Meme Of The Week
🦿 Legged Robotic Companies Starting on the Right Foot
Robotics company Figure has raised $70 million in a Series A funding round, led by Parkway Venture Capital. This follows a self-financed $100 million seed round by founder and CEO Brett Adcock. Despite not fully revealing its robot, Figure 01, the company confirmed that it has begun walking within its first year, claiming this as the industry's fastest timeline. Figure is recruiting talent from leading tech companies to accelerate development.
ANYbotics secured a $50 million Series B funding round, following $22 million raised in 2020, led by Walden Catalyst and NGP Capital. The investment supports the deployment of ANYmal X, a four-legged industrial robot. With $150 million in preorders from major gas/oil and chemical companies, the firm aims to increase productivity, safety, and automate maintenance in challenging industrial environments.
Sanctuary AI unveiled its sixth-generation humanoid general-purpose robot, Phoenix™, powered by a unique AI control system, Carbon™. Designed to perform a wide range of tasks across various industries, Phoenix is equipped with advanced robotic hands and a human-like form. Sanctuary AI has secured over $100 million in funding, supporting its mission to address labor challenges through robotic deployments
📰 ~Non~ Leg-Based Hardware News!
Matician is a Series A startup with ~$30M in funding from investors like John and Patrick Collison (Co-Founders of Stripe), Matt Rogers (Founder of Nest), Nat Friedman (CEO of GitHub). They’ve just launched a robot cleaner called Matic which, for the price of $125 a month, will vacuum and mop your floors. At such a hefty recurring cost, performance will have to be stunning. Matic is set to ship in fall 2023.
Dyson is releasing the Dyson 360 Vis Nav in a bid to target the US robot cleaner market after the failure of the Dyson 360 Eye in 2016.
Apple’s technology development group (TDG) will allegedly announce its first mixed reality (MR) headset on June 5th during the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC). It’s rumored to be years ahead of the competition, hopefully taking advantage of Apple’s next gen silicon designs. Before we get your hopes too high, it’s also likely to be very expensive and mainly for developers so they can build out the software infrastructure prior to main consumer adoption. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey was hyped on it (though his distaste for Meta may have biased this response), so hopefully we can look forward to some high quality hardware! Integration with other Apple devices (called the “Apple constellation”) give them a leg up on the competition, but lack of experience in the gaming market and a tough economy could provide strong headwinds.
Humane (Series C: $100 million, valuation: $850 million), a company which proclaims it’s desire to “reshape the role of technology in our lives” (and notably says almost nothing else about its product), has #softLaunched its first product via a Ted Talk given by co-Founder Imran Chaudhri. Though the hardware was frankly disappointing compared to the hype, we believe there is a TON of potential in regards to personalized data collection. Imagine being able to feed a video of your entire day (or year for that matter) into ChatGPT. When combined with data from an iWatch or Oura ring, this would give powerful insight into health patterns and enable substantial innovation in our ability to analyze our own lives (for better or for worse).
👼 Interning 101: Do’s & Don’ts
So you got an internship! Congrats! Now comes the fun part, interning!
An internship is a 10-16 week journey characterized by two things: expectation setting, and execution. It’s only a dozen or so weeks, so you won’t change the world. Don’t promise anything you can’t actually deliver on, and deliver on what you promise. A successful internship is one where the intern requires little babysitting from other engineers and solves actual problems. The key to this is finishing what you set out to do. Nothing is worse than handing off a half-baked project to a full-time engineer who doesn’t have the time to finish it and probably couldn’t track down all the details if they tried. You need to be a value add asset, and setting realistic expectations and delivering on them is crucial. That said, here are some tips on how to WOW during your internship.
If you didn’t document the work you did, you might as well not have done it.
I like having a running presentation documenting every aspect of what I worked on. While it may be hundreds of slides long by the end, it is an awesome way to keep everything in one place. It also makes coming up with your midpoint/final presentation a breeze, and if someone asks you a question during a meeting, *BOOM* you already have slides documenting the issue and how it’s being resolved. It sounds like a lot of work, but this is actually one of our favorite tips and will make your life way easier in the long run. Here are some other things to consider adding to the presentation:
Requirements: Make sure the requirements of your summer are well defined, and write it down, confirming with your mentor it’s validity. What will make your internship a success?
Timeline: Have a one-slide Gantt chart or Excel file marking all 12 weeks. Fill it in over time. You will be able to see the clock counting down
Intern BOM: List all the CAD parts you created (and any you need access to) with their part numbers. Every company has a different part management system, one thing that is universal is that they suck when trying to track down parts someone else made. Document! Yours!
Important Links: You can have a dedicated slide or just link things as you go. Linking resources, design justifications, spec. sheets, tools, etc. will be super helpful for you to find in the future along with any other coworker
Beyond these basic ones, it’s up to you. More documentation is better than less. Don’t let it fall off as the summer progresses
What is RISK? Your biggest risk is not finishing your project/objective. Given the very very tight timeline, de-risking everything is essential to finishing. What will take the longest to design? What has the longest lead time? What requirements aren’t defined yet? What is out of your control? Do you need to test anything? Managing risk starts day one. Tackle the problems that are most urgent and inhibit you from addressing other things. What is not important? Just because someone told you to do something doesn’t mean you should do it immediately (although open communication is also important). It might not in fact be the highest priority, they don’t know all the details of your project. It is very easy to spend multiple weeks going down a rabbit hole someone else started digging. Question everything.
By questioning everything, I don’t mean pestering your manager 24/7. Yes, you won’t know everything. But a key to being a successful intern is spreading your questions and gathering information from many people. The other engineers on your team will have answers. Project managers will have answers, Other interns can answer the basic questions you are too embarrassed to ask. Never be complacent because you don’t know something.
PowerPoint CAD can be sufficient for many concepts. Many times during your summer, making a bunch of colorful labeled blocks in PowerPoint may be a better way to convey an idea than actually CADing, especially if it’s just a cross section. That is fine! And, it's probably faster. Use this tool as needed!
Relationships impact your internship in dozens of different ways. Yes, you should get to know your team. Yes, you should get to know other interns. These are simple. But, what can make the real difference is how you form relationships with colleagues on other projects/teams. Doing this early in your internship is key. It gives you the ability to leverage these relationships later in your internship to get things you might not be able to get otherwise. You might be able to get the shop to turn around parts faster for you. You might be able to get 1 on 1 advice from an expert on the aerodynamics team. What form the support may come in is hard to predict. So form lots of relationships and figure out what you need later. Plus you’ll hopefully make some friends along the way!
Bringing everyone involved with your project into one room a couple of times during the summer can be invaluable. I like to do this via a requirements review 2-3 weeks into the summer. What are your goals? What problems are you solving first, last? What are you unsure of? What resources do you need? What do you know? What do you know you don’t know? That way you can find out what you what don’t know you don’t know? Get these all out on the table. Get feedback, take notes, and listen to other stakeholders discuss things with each other. It is so so valuable.
6-8 weeks in is a good time for a Preliminary Design Review (PDR) / Mid Point Presentation. This has two key aspects. It lets you share with everyone what you have been up to. What has worked? What didn’t work? What roadblocks are you facing? It also lets you create slides on that work that you can then use again for your final presentation. In 6 weeks, the things you did 6 weeks before will seem like a distant memory. Having quality slides you can reference and slide in (pun intended) will make your final presentation much easier to prepare.
2-3 days before your last day you should host a final presentation. Invite EVERYONE. Coworkers you met in the lunch lines, everyone you Slacked/Teamsed, PMs, execs, interns, etc. This is the lasting impression you will make, and will be crucial to people remembering in weeks and months who you are, and potentially the key to getting a return offer. Make it 60 minutes. You won’t be able to do it in 30. Why rush? Now is your time to shine! Have a good mix of overview and technical deep dive depending on how much content you have. Either way, make sure you are a subject matter expert on anything getting presented on, and make sure the slides are clear, concise, and aesthetic. Beautiful slides are more digestible. We may be engineers, but a sexy slide deck with good graphics will draw more eyes than than a wall of text. Make sure to give good context and illustrate the problems you solved directly (what action did YOU take to resolve the issue). It never hurts to have any additional deep dive info you have but didn’t fit into your presentation well in an appendix. There is almost always a Q&A after your presentation, so having even more slides detailing their questions can be be a big plus. At the end of the day, in three weeks or two months when someone wants to remember what you worked on, this will be the first thing they look at.
Note: during your panel interview for full time employment, it is typical for the people interviewing you to pull up your final presentation slide deck and look at it in advance, asking you relevant questions throughout the interview.
The final step to a successful internship is a clean handoff. You need to take everything you have done over the last 12-16 weeks and put it all in one place along with a guide. Did you make a new assembly? Make sure it is released (or whatever your company does for change management). Make sure the BOM is accurate. Did you get parts quoted? Link the quotes and contacts. All your emails will disappear along with those correspondences. What are all the little things you have learned about what you are working on that aren’t important enough to be documented yet? Write them down. Create a how-to guide for any project you have touched in case someone needs to see it later. Also, add everyone you met on LinkedIn, and ideally, write down their email. You never know when you might need it.
Next newsletter we’ll publish a more detailed timeline of what your internship should look like and how to get that return offer!
For more guides on mechanical engineering topics check out our website!