“Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.” – Elon Musk

Amidst the natural disasters and the follow-up inconveniences, this penultimate week has given me ample time to sit alone and reflect on the good times. Especially the past few weeks.

The whole internship has been somewhat like a trip to the future. Coming from a setting that doesn’t place enough importance on hands on application, this experience has been a breath of fresh air. It allowed us pose as engineers for a while, think and act like them too. And for me, it certainly rejuvenated my interest in engineering.


The first thing I realised was how beneficial it was working with people of similar interests and knowledge and yet diverse experiences. The Rice360 internship is a very diverse place. It’s the most diverse I’ve seen, {15 people, 9 countries}. And because of that, everyone has different conditionings. Different mindsets, heartsets and soulsets that’s infused in everything they do, say or think.
It’s this same feature that allows other people see the weaknesses your ideas or even help complete them.

Usually, I prefer to work alone but now I’m more open to collaborating with others. Without a team, many defects go unnoticed and many ideas go unrealised. It’s literally all in your head and that can only go so far.



As there’s been a lot of cutting, glueing, planning, programming, calculating and designing for our Automated water sampling machine. There, I learnt it’s nice to not confine yourself to one scope of engineering. I’ve always had many interests, so I ventured into subjects outside my field of electrical engineering. I’ve explored structural, mechanical, computer and materials engineering and by chance, many of the skills I acquired during this pursuit came out to be rather useful. I’m able to work on just any part of the project and it’s fun getting to do so many things in the same project.
It also helped me realise many things that I’m yet to learn, or understand.


I appreciate that the experience is based on the actual process engineers employ. And doing that, I got to tick off most of the skills I wrote down before starting the internship. For instance, my fabrication skills are much better thanks to working with the mechanical engineering student {Brandon} on our team. I don’t just use hot glue for everything anymore.
And I learnt more about programs version control and electrical requirements from the Electrical student {Deepak}. We got to practice live, alternating between different roles and I’ll surely be going back ohm with an amplified knowledge base. (I apologise for the bad puns…)


Working on one thing for hours a day for weeks, made me appreciate the effort that goes into everyday technologies. It’s been revealed that nothing will ever go as planned 😂. In prototyping, everything that could go wrong will and most of the experience is just you correcting errors, crushing bugs or quietly praying you don’t blow anything up. It’s 10% building or programming and 90% fixing things and ideas that just weren’t ‘good enough’.
A strong understanding of the concepts is needed, but even at that the practical application says something else. You spend most of the time figuring out why something doesn’t work. And when it does, you spend extra time figuring out why it does work and what you can learn from that.
This experience helps to build mental models that can be applied in other situations to minimise the errors by seeing the problem or likely problem from afar.


I’ve also learnt that being an engineer isn’t just being good at calculus. Of course that help, but engineers are also good technicians, idea people, communicators, scientists, researchers, speakers, team workers and leaders. Wearing different hats and performing different tricks is what makes us!

I learnt to appreciate each step in the engineering design process was important and what a difference it made for our endeavours. The hours of research, the rigorous testing, the problem definition and criteria happened to be the pacesetter for the transformation that would follow.

We’re going further in our endeavours and even though the circumstances aren’t the finest, we’ve got the grits to push through.

It gets messy before it becomes beautiful. Trust the process!

Before I go, I’ll ask you, how many engineers does it take to make something awesome and magical?
None, they don’t need to be engineers… yet.