WORK REPORT REFLECTION ESSAY

As a part of my UH Cooperative Education
Program, I worked as an Electrification intern in the Research and Development
Department of an Elevator and Escalator giant, KONE Corporation. KONE provides
elevators, escalators and automatic building doors, as well as solutions for
modernization and maintenance to add value to buildings throughout their life
cycle. I am working with the company since June 2017 and will be ending my
internship in December 2017.

During my six months cooperative internship, I
worked majorly on two projects. The first project, AnyLyft, included designing
a product according to the requirements presented by the installation and service
teams. I designed a sensor device that reads the constant data of the elevator
like speed of the cab, counts of door opening on each floor, counts of stops on
each floor etc. from the control panel of the elevator and sends it to the
server. At the server end, the data is then analyzed to predict service
maintenance before any component failure. In this project, I worked from
concept designing to prototyping the design which gave me a chance to work with
all different departments of the company giving me project management
experience.

In my second project, I was a part of a team
that proposed a new design for Controller Box and Cartop Box. I designed the
electrification architecture for both the boxes using Auto-CAD and  Microsoft Visio as a part of this project.
While working on both the projects, I got a deeper insight in the electrical
and computer engineering industry. The best part of working with KONE was that
the interns are treated as first year engineers and are assigned tasks and
given responsibilities similar to full time engineers.

This role as an Electrification Research and
Development Intern with the KONE Technology and Innovation Department has been
very challenging as the team works very hard to find new and innovative
solutions to problems proposed by other teams. One of the major challenges that
I faced was getting myself acquainted to the SAP Product Management System
which is used for maintaining the company documents regarding every single
product. To overcome this challenge, I sought my manager who contacted the SAP
expert in the company and organized a one day workshop for the interns to
understand the basics of the Product Management System. Being a R&D
Engineer, I had to design the product as a whole which forced me to learn basics
of mechanical engineering as well which was challenging at first. However, the
seniors and mentors were always ready and willing to give their advice and
guidance to help me overcome these challenges.

Through this internship, I gained valuable
insight of the inner workings of a professional Research and Development
Department in the company ranked 73rd on the ‘ World’s Best Employer
2017’ list by the Forbes Magazine. My internship gave me a taste of what I want
to do in the future and helped me choose my courses for my last semester. I
have learnt both the tangibles, such as the technical aspects involved in the
process of Product Design from concept to Prototyping, as well as the
intangibles, such as the strong work ethic and the high standards required of
our work. During my entire work experience, my manager and my colleagues have
been very helpful and supportive to me in terms of any information required or
any technical knowledge that I needed. All in all, my experience working for
KONE has been very education, professional, competitive and fun loving at the
same time.