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I worked as an engineering intern within the new product development group at Delta Design. It was a very good internship in that I learned a crap load...seriously. I got a lot of "design this bracket" jobs at first, but as time went on I was given more opportunity to do more things and larger assemblies. At Delta I did a lot of things that we never learned in school such as working with SolidWorks a lot, creating engineering part and assembly drawings, taking into account tolerance issues, as well as learning to design parts for machining/assembly. It was the busiest internship of the three internships that I've done.

Specifically, I worked on a tray input/output transport system. Delta Design makes computer chip test handlers, and the tray transport system is basically the section of the machine that moves the chips (on trays) from the loading port to the test chamber and then to the storage area after the chips are sorted. The machines are not very mainstream at all so most folks have never seen one in action. In terms of engineering, the handlers are very cool though as they contain all sorts of motors with servos, crazy intricate (and not so intricate) machined parts, cable tracks, sensors galore, and linear bearings everywhere. it's impressive to watch one in action.

I liked the development aspect of my job a lot was I was creating a lot of things from scratch. There was a lot of time spent 3D modeling and thinking about how to reduce cost and design parts for machining and assembly. Basically, I felt like a real engineer. The kind of engineering they tell you you'll be doing when you are in school. I also liked my co-workers a lot. I was the youngest in the group of course so I got a lot of the busy work at times, but the guys were very cool and very helpful. I even went golfing a couple of times with some of the guys. The pace of work was fast as well. That is very refreshing to me since I like to be busy and faced with different tasks all the time.

Some of the things that I didn't like were the physical environment and lack of advancement. Everything was kind of "blah" in the area like the cubes, offices, break rooms. For a high tech company it wasn't very high tech. At the time when I was there the backend assembly semiconductor industry was in a slump so I was not able to be hired on as a full time engineer even though my bosses liked me. Oh yeah, and the company has a horrible girl to guy ratio...it's like 1:10, and the girls that do work there are 28+. Most are like 38+.

Overall, a good experience for me though. They treat their interns very well at Delta Design