Engineering Internship Highlight: Medtronic
Hi Readers,
Something really cool I got to be a part of was working for Medtronic the summer after my first-year at Tufts. If you haven’t heard of them, they are a global medical device company that has a wide array of products. I got to work on one of their manufacturing sites where they made millions of long, skinny, flexible tubes that would go inside the body for things like heart valve replacement and deep brain stimulation.
What I focused on more specifically was the technologies that make the different catheters (long skinny flexible tubes), and the intricate process it takes to manufacture them. This internship was between the summer of my first-year and sophomore year, under the Women in Science and Engineering program. So I was a part of a large cohort of female interns who were all rising freshmen and sophomores, trying to get experience in the medical device industry. While I was working at a site north of Boston, I also got to go to the Boston site and look at all the surgical robots that are in development, and all the software that goes into that, as well as a larger manufacturing site in Connecticut, where I got to see how surgical staplers are made.
There was a lot of opportunity for professional development and to get to talk to tenured engineers about ways I can shape my career and what I could do post graduation. Looking back on it, it felt like a million years ago, but these are connections and experiences that I will forever have and have helped me learn what I like and don’t like about working in the industry. Also, it was really fun because the person in the cubicle next to mine was a Tufts Alum!
I spent most of my summer learning about cutting technologies, microscopes, fiber winding, extrusion, vision inspection systems, and testing patent technologies. Having a sense of industry experience before I started taking my mechanical engineering classes was also really useful because it helped me have a sense of how the theory I was learning was actually being applied and what electives I could take that would help me prepare for different jobs and opportunities I would like to work for in the future.