" In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and snap, the job is a game."

Meet Laura

Laura's Internship Experience

My name is Laura Gonzalez, I am an international student at National Taipei University of Technology (Taipei Tech) doing my Bachelor in Electronic Engineering. I have been living in Taiwan for the last four, almost five years of my life, so I was already familiar with the Taiwanese culture when I came to Pioneer. I have Taiwanese friends and professors, but I had never been in a working environment, therefore, before coming to Pioneer I did not know what to expect. During my first week at Pioneer I was glad to find out that the Taiwanese are as friendly at the workplace as everywhere else. It was very refreshing to feel comfortable between colleagues and although I was just an intern, I felt as important as my coworkers, and I felt like I could ask any questions, because everyone was very patient, kind and always willing to give me the information that I needed.

I was with Pioneer for nine wonderful months. My responsibility as an intern was to research OPC UA, which is a machine to machine communication protocol for industrial automation developed by the OPC Foundation. The main objective of the project was for Pioneer to be able to access the data of  their clients’ servers by implementing said protocol. At first, it seemed like an intimidating task since I was not confident in my coding skills, and I ran into many new concepts while researching (the server-client model, event-driven systems, etc.) , but I knew that taking on this challenge would help me learn and to evolve into a better engineer. Luckily enough, my mentor was Ike, Pioneer’s networking engineer, who did a great job by guiding me throughout the process.

I originally applied for the internship program at Pioneer because my school required me to do an off-campus internship, luckily, I was accepted. My original plan was to intern for just one semester, however, after having such a great experience, I was eager to accept our R&D manager, Jeff Huang’s offer to continue at Pioneer for a few more months. During the second half of my internship, the project I was in charge of, was a little bit different. Since I was already more familiar with the OPC UA protocol I was required to design Pioneer’s OPC UA server, providing our clients with the possibility to access our production lines’ data. This time, I had to understand OPC UA’s structure architecture on a deeper level; due to all the research that I did my networking-related knowledge was amplified, and my coding skills were refined as well.

 

ABOUT Laura

 

Position: R&D Engineer Intern

Education: Electrical Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology

Office: Pioneer Headquarters, Taipei, Taiwan.

An important part of my experience as an intern in Pioneer was my coworkers. I cannot stress enough how helpful and kind everyone was, especially when helping me practice my Mandarin! I am certain when I say that Pioneer is a company that values its employees; as a result, the working environment is very relaxed and everyone feels like they belong to something bigger than themselves.

I am glad that I had the opportunity to intern at Pioneer Machinery for almost a year because they had the patience to let me learn everything that I had to learn and then put it to use. I am more confident in my abilities after this internship.

What I researched during my internship has more to do with Computer Science than to Electronic Engineering, for this reason, I have been considering doing a masters in something related to computer networking.

I am very satisfied with my experience as an intern in Pioneer Machinery, I have learned a lot and I have found great friends in the process.

 

 

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