Engineering Co-op
Nora
Experience Information
Employer: Twisthink
Job Title: Engineering Intern
Major: Interdisciplinary Engineering
Received Credit: Yes
Paid: Yes
Abroad: No
Description of the Organization
Twisthink is a professional service company based in Holland, MI. comprised of engineers, designers and strategists. The foundational conviction of Twisthink is that innovation is of paramount importance to a company's success, regardless of the industry. Twisthink provides inventive strategy through their human-centered design process, intuitive design, and ground-breaking technology development as a means to elevate their clients to new heights. The company was founded in 2001 and is relatively small in numbers with less than 40 total employees, but their accomplishments speak volumes about their work ethic and skill. Twisthink annually completes more than 150 projects and serves 27 fortune 500 clients. The foundation of this company may be innovation, but the powerhouse at its core is the tremendous culture they've built with their employees.
Description of the Tasks/Projects Completed
At Twisthink, I worked in the AI and Computer Vision team. This team is responsible for creating systems that map perceived environmental conditions to suggestions, answers, decisions, and autonomous actions. The projects I worked on were in the early research and development phases. Our goal was to identify the most effective detection system within given constraints. To do this, we took an iterative approach, evaluating the effectiveness of several sensors and their associated detection algorithms. One project included the development of a sensor and algorithm to detect the strokes of a deep well hand pump utilized in third world villages. The purpose for this was to track the health of the pump over time. Currently, if a pump breaks, it takes time to mobilize the resources to fix it, leaving locals without water. The device I worked on will use signal processing and machine learning to process signals from special sensors. The processed signals will be sent to the cloud allowing the health of pumps to be monitored and resources allocated prior to their failure.
Skills/Knowledge Gained Through The Experience
I was able to gain valuable experience in signal processing and algorithm development.
Favorite Part of the Experience
It is hard to chose which part of the experience is may favorite but it come down between the work I was doing and the people I was able to do it with. In combination, I was provided with a top-notch co-op experience.
How the Experience Influenced Future Career Goals
The experience has made my goals of going into medical device and technology design more tangible and possible than ever before. The hands on experience has allowed me to grow my knowledge base and skill set exponentially.