In the tumultuous age of COVID-19, I am still fortunate enough to have an in-person experience this summer working as a Materials Engineering Intern here at Indium Corporation. It has only been two weeks since the start of my Indium Corporation Internship and I couldn’t be more pleased with my experience working for an essential business thus far. I’ve been able to travel to multiple facilities and work in both production and lab settings. My summer project will be to update the company solder alloy directory, which is comprised of various properties and constants that describe all of the different solder alloys Indium Corporation manufactures and sells. While experiments have only begun, everyone I’ve met so far has made me feel welcome and genuinely interested in merging my skills with the team’s.
This lead me to grasp the magnitude of the mutual investment between Indium Corporation and their employees, highlighted with the interns. Onboarding can be a costly process in terms of time and resources for full-time employees in most businesses, especially interns. Meanwhile I’ve met and received advice from a myriad of professionals in various departments within days of starting at all education levels. This idea of a mutual investment also correlates to my internship experience itself along the lines of the trope, "you get out what you put in". Increasing your stake in your work leads to a greater personal investment and reaping a greater payoff in the end. Hearing from the company CEO and COO during orientation convinced me that The Indium Way is not a platitude, but a method to shape a morale that starts with my fellow interns and permeates out to our clients. I have even received individualized instruction from scientists on equipment older than myself!
At the advice of my supervisor, I plan on not only focusing on my technical project during my time at Indium Corporation, but developing my skills as an individual who will soon enough enter an ever-changing job market. In the words of Dale Carnegie, “arouse in the other person an eager want”; so far, Indium Corporation could not have made this statement more true for me.
Stay Healthy,
Matthew