Internship #2

Today was the kickstart of my second engineering internship.  It's been awhile since I've been in the office setting and Intuitive is a lot different than GE, but I think it's all going to work out really well.  My coach at Stanford put me in touch with one of the senior managers there awhile back and after working the contact I was asked to join her team.  I will be helping with one of their major projects and hopefully doing a good enough job to aid in getting their newest products to market.

I met with one of the senior engineers on the team this morning to go over what exactly I'll be doing over the next two months.  The conversation went in a bunch of different directions and there was a whole lot of information to take in, but I'm so excited to get going.  There is a ton of paperwork to handle this week (getting me up to speed on the specifics of the project) and I won't officially start until Monday.  I'm "working from home" for the rest of this week and meeting again on Friday to go over everything I've been able to digest over the course of a couple of days.

With what I know right now, the medical robot currently in use in hospitals can be used in a long list of procedures spanning many areas of the body; the problem is that any small change to the robot or the tools it uses requires many forms to be pushed through the system.  Over the next eight weeks I'm going to learn how to use the robot and watch many narrated videos of various surgeries.

This morning I was given many documents to go through, a nice medical atlas, my own spiffy notebook, and it's my job right now to try to dissect one of the minimally invasive procedures (out of about 30).  Amy, the senior engineer, took two hours out of her day to teach me about the documents and I found myself taking notes and hanging on her every word.  The time flew by and before I knew it she had to jet off to another meeting.  I left feeling completely stoked about things and I can't wait to see what I can make of project.  My only hope is that I can do an adequate job...it's going to be slow-going at first but the expectation is that I will pick up speed as I get more comfortable.  Day one is done, with much more to come very soon!