<We’ve had some great people come and do internships at Purrmetrix. Say hello to Fiona, our latest colleague, who’s agreed to answer a few some questions about her work experience here.>
Tell us about yourself?
I’m Fiona, a sixth form student in Cambridge currently in the midst of applying to study engineering at university, and, for the last two weeks, a work experience intern at Purrmetrix.
What is all that fiddling with PCBs you’ve been doing?
All of the things!
Over the last two weeks, I’ve got forty-eight gateways ready to go – this involves a small amount of soldering on each one, cleaning the components on the PCB, fitting the antenna, and installing the whole setup into the case. Once this part is complete, I’ve had help to find each individual gateway on the system so that I can get the correct passphrase for it printed out and stuck onto the case, along with the serial number. Finally, each gateway gets plugged in (only using one socket, since these ones have power over ethernet) so that I can check it’s transmitting to the system and install the latest version of our software onto it. Then the gateway is ready to go!
But a gateway by itself isn’t much use…. So I’ve also been involved in building ninety-six kittens. My job covered the first few steps in the process of turning a sheet of circuit boards into a fully-functioning kittens: extracting them from the sheet, plugging them in via the programming widget, and installing the software that enables them to transmit their temperature data to the gateways. Once this update was done, I soldered a radio antenna onto each kitten to improve its range of transmission – and then passed them on to Winston for some more advanced testing and the final stage of assembly.
Was it all engineering?
No! Throughout my time here, I’ve also been involved in other aspects of the company. This means going to meetings, and getting stuck into other types of task. I spent some time doing market research for Hermione – starting with some fairly abstract googling, and ending up with a (colour coded!) spreadsheet of the relevant information.
As well as that I’ve been creating a demonstration account. This needed a major Kitten Hunt around the office to find all of the kittens left in random places during test runs (this went fine until I found some on the ceiling, which were slightly out of my reach). I then took my pile of found kittens and used the system to identify them. Those that were involved in testing were returned to the person in charge of the relevant project, and I “adopted” the rest. I then put the “adopted” kittens into a new project and spent some time creating views for them that will later be used for demonstrations.
This was a great opportunity for me to really get to grips with the data outputs for the kittens, and the full range of analysis that the software can do.
What’s it like?
It’s a really friendly company – everyone here seems to be happy to explain things to me and to teach me how to do whatever I need to know for my latest task. Being set a variety of jobs is great, as it means I get to learn loads of new stuff and see how lots of different aspects of the company work. There’s also a set of company mugs with the kitten face logo on, which I found slightly too exciting…. All in all, I’ve had a great time learning lots of new stuff, building things, and finding out about Purrmetrix during my time here!
<Awww, thanks Fiona. You’ve got great kitten herding skills! Also insane ideas of what makes a good biscuit
Interested in an intern role in Purrmetrix? Get in touch with us – we are always interested in hearing from people who want careers in engineering or marketing. Baking skills not mandatory.>