Mehboob Karim

What motivated you to apply for Co-op/Internship

Starting my engineering career by getting first-hand experience was one of the many reasons why I applied for an internship.

Can you describe your position in a few sentences?

My position was "Technical support intern" where I was working with teams of engineers and customer operations, dealing with the administrative duties of the company as well as testing software deployment. 

Did you receive training to perform your engineering duties? Please Explain.

Most of the training was a combination of my existing engineering knowledge and shadowing the previous intern, whose term overlapped with mine until I was fully trained. This was designed so that in a 16-month program I would spend the first 4 months being trained by the previous intern and in my last 4 months, I would be responsible for training the next intern. 

What was your work atmosphere like? (flexibility, formality, team-centric, supportive)

The work atmosphere has been very supportive and flexible, where I also had the option to work from home on given days. Work ethic is very team-centric and clear communication between the team members is very important. Taking initiative was very rewarding, as there were a lot of tests that needed to be performed weekly. 

What new skills were you able to learn/develop during your Co-op/Internship?

I was able to improve my public speaking skills by taking part in weekly sprint meetings. In addition, I improved my ability to learn quickly, as I had to learn many aspects of the job independently when other experienced team members were busy with different projects.

How did your experience compare with your expectations?

This was a new challenge for me because most of the work I had done before was not related to the field I am currently studying. However, I did not know what to expect as an intern working on a small team. As I learned more about my responsibilities, I was able to see that interns were viewed as full-time employees. There are no barriers between team members and everyone shares the workload equally. 

What was your proudest moment? 

In a 16 month period, I’ve had many accomplishments that made me proud, especially in an environment where we constantly work on improving and testing bugs. Overall, my proudest moment was last December when I was given the responsibility of testing the whole firmware and was able to finish the task successfully and well ahead of the deadline that was assigned.

What advice would you offer to current students thinking about pursuing Co-op/Internship?

My personal advice would be to ask students to participate in lectures more by answering questions and showing up. We students often overlook the importance of labs, lectures and doing homework. So far, if there’s one thing that has helped me more than anything at work, it was the knowledge I gained from the labs over the years at Ontario Tech.