My name is Daniel Soong, and I interned as a Student Pathways Trainee at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. There I interned with the Instrumentation Design of Engineering Application Solutions section, or for short the IDEAS team within the National Institute of Biomedical and Bioengineering (NIBIB). As a full-time employee of the federal government, I received what an actual researcher would experience wise. In addition to onboarding, I had to go through various federal training and red tape, and even had to swear an oath to the constitution. The overall experience had some advantages and disadvantages. On one hand I had to commute to work 50 minutes away every day, and doing so for a couple months showed me that I wanted to have a workplace that was within 20 minutes of home for long term. On the other hand, I found that as an employee with a badge, I had a lot of freedom to access different areas around campus. With this freedom I was able to wander around into the underground tunnel system that links many of the buildings and explore different facilities that had open doors. Additionally building 10 was an active clinical research center, and seeing how biomedical research interacted with patients in a clinical environment was inspiring. Finally, I was super fortunate to have a tour of the electromechanical areas used to supply building utilities to the whole campus and learned a little bit about the electrical designs of all the systems.
I found my internship through Careers 4 Engineers, a university run job connection program for engineers. My advice is that students should actively apply to internships and job opportunities much like college applications and hoping for the best through company websites, school portals, or even career fairs. Many times, internships will not turn out for students, however it's best to keep up hope. When considering an internship site, students should look holistically as a college would look at students. Factors such as location, morals of work, pay, and area of research for the work are common factors students should carefully consider aligning before selecting an internship. Personally, after applying and going through the interview process, I was able to meet my site supervisor Tom Pohida. We were quickly able to exchange e-mail information even before the internship started, and after the internship started, we still primarily communicated with e-mail. I did have his phone number, but I only used it for communicating urgent messages like if I was late or needed access to the building and forgot my badge. Students can expect to get a taste of the real-world job environment that many people live and work in, which many times is much more serious and straightforward. I was also very fortunate to have a forgiving team and work environment that was low stress, which I've come to understand is not common among all workplaces. My overall experience has changed my perception of the working world; however, it has also empowered me to strive for a less time-consuming job in the future. While what I did at NIH was super interesting, it has helped shape what I want to do in the future a little.
Working at an NIH I was with a team of full-time biomedical electrical engineers that were constantly developing clinical solutions for a wide range of different applications. I was able to see how work was done in the field and how some of my classes knowledge applied. Many people say that working in your job will utilize a completely different set of skills than what do you learn in school, however I've come to find that many times what I learned in school applied to why work at NIH, and conversely the practical experience I gained NIH served as a soft introduction to some of my electrical engineering classes at University of Maryland. My work at NIH directly supported researchers and the institute sometimes, and I'm proud to say that I've left an impact, if small, on the medical and scientific world. The scientific knowledge and background I've learned at school and from scholars has helped, like the engineering design process and the scientific method of proving hypotheses we learned about Can be applicable in many different situations while developing instrumentation and tools for the researchers there. Seeing as the work I did at NIH was representative of a possible future career track, I feel that my field of study has been narrowed a little bit more. I enjoyed what I did at NIH and would like to pursue this a little more in-depth. Working at an NIH has also given me a taste of the government sector and how the federal bureaucracy operates. While I don't believe I will spend a lot of my junior electrical engineer experience in the government sector, I think that it is a viable option for most people as it is low stress and very high morally rewarding helping to advance medical research and science. I would consider NIH as a more senior electrical engineer, where after I've spent most of my career doing high intensity high profile projects in the private sector, I can take a step back and give back to the scientific community and relax. NIH has helped me consider where I want to end up in the electrical engineering field, however I feel the same about my career path and post bachelor plans as before I started the internship.
I am extremely thankful to the IDEAS team at NIH for giving me a taste of the biomedical industry, and kickstarting my career with an awesome internship.
