August 31 - Christie Digital

I walked in this internship thinking it was going to be one of two options: A summer placement where I would do menial and useless cubical work, or an intense position that only a super genius could fill. And by the end of this month I realized that it was definitely the second one. I’m definitely not a portable super quantum computer on wheels, able to do anything within a couple seconds, but I tried my best and found that it was enough.

The first couple days at Christie were some pretty shocking days. I came in and was totally blown away by the people who were working there, and how smart they were on the topics that circulated inside the company. Then I was taken on a tour… This building had EVERYTHING! Its own workshops, stores, workout rooms, cafeteria, offices, labs, production facility, you name it; the only thing they no longer had was a pool. And to top off being thrown into this immense building filled with academically inclined people, I realized I had to become one of those people in order to function here. Sure enough, my supervisor jumped right on that and launched me into the system with hundreds of pages of reading, and confidence that I would shine.

As the days went by, I soon became familiar with everything that was going on. In order to complete those projects I learned to access parts and their information, how to analyze data efficiently, how to find accurate data, the specific science behind it, how to buy parts (yes, I got to shop and buy hundreds of dollars work of parts; awesome I know), create my own experiments, and write up reports, among many other things. The nice thing is that all of these things seem so second nature by today that I even found it hard to really ask myself what did I gain… the environment I was in made it seem as though I had known these things all along.

But with all of this ending, and my grade 12 year approaching, I am more and more grateful that I had this chance to be in the position I was in for the summer, and I know it has given me many new skills and thoughts that I will carry on with me in my years to come. To be honest, it's taken a couple minutes to write this, but I am a ranter and know that if I could, I would write another 10 pages to fully express the things I have experienced in this past month, but then it wouldn’t be a blog, it would be another report.

So to finish with a closing statement, I would definitely say that I do not regret applying for an internship one bit. This opened my eyes and helped me look at my future through different, more patient and experienced eyes. It was a great experience, I would recommend it to anyone and it helped shape me a lot.

Laurentiu Anton
Hometown: Kitchener, ON