Internships at research labs set up on campus by NTU and big-name corporations help students find their passions and boost their career prospects
by Kenny Chee
Rodney Manega
Pranshu Kharbanda
Liu Ruili
Mehal Agarwal
During classes, mechanical engineering undergraduate Rodney Manega came to enjoy learning about systems that prevent vehicle engines from overheating.
So when an internship opportunity opened in 2021 at a research laboratory set up by British engineering giant Rolls-Royce and NTU that worked on such electromechanical systems, he jumped at it.
While working on the systems during his five-month internship at the Rolls-Royce@NTU Corporate Laboratory, the then third-year NTU student discovered another passion – designing the systems themselves.
“I found what I loved to do and it made me want to work harder to secure a role as a mechanical design engineer after I graduate,” says Rodney, 26, a Singaporean whose family hails from Tanzania.
Other NTU students who have done internships at the university’s corp labs – government-funded research tie-ups between NTU and big-name industry partners – tell HEY! that their stints helped them to find areas of work that they are passionate about.
Pranshu Kharbanda, who interned at the Rolls-Royce@NTU Corp Lab for five months in 2020, says he developed a fondness for working on computational simulations that test the effectiveness of a thermal management system he and a colleague designed to help cool systems found in hybrid and electric aircraft.
“I never knew I had a passion for these simulations until I was exposed to such tasks and projects,” says Pranshu, 22.
He graduated in 2022 with a degree in mechanical engineering and was offered a position at the Rolls-Royce@NTU Corp Lab as a research engineer – an offer he could not refuse as the role would let him continue working in the aviation sector and in research, his two loves.
NTU currently has seven corp labs with industry heavyweights – including Rolls-Royce, American technology giant HP and German multinational Continental. These companies tap the university’s deep research capabilities to develop innovations for the world. According to NTU’s Career & Attachment Office, there were more than 75 internship opportunities offered by these labs in 2022.
Other joint labs set up by NTU with major industry players – such as Schaeffler, Alibaba and L’Oréal – also offer internship opportunities to students.
A boon to studies
Former interns say that the corp lab experience gave them a leg up in their studies.
During her six-month internship with the HP-NTU Digital Manufacturing Corporate Lab in 2021, Liu Ruili helped to highlight findings from research papers, particularly on monitoring 3D printing processes to detect defects, which is relevant to the lab’s work of improving 3D printing technologies.
The 23-year-old, who graduated with a mechanical engineering degree last year, learnt how to extract key information from academic research, which helped in the writing of her final-year project research paper.
In Rodney’s case, he says that he used the skills he gleaned from his internship to design a machine more easily as part of a group project for a module he later took. If not for his experience, his group could have spent many more weeks on design work.
A career booster
Apart from imparting industry-relevant skills, a corp lab stint also improves job prospects, say the former interns.
With the software skills gained from his internship at the Rolls-Royce-NTU lab, Pranshu observes: “I matched more job requirements and was able to expand my job search.” He landed a few plum job offers and has come full circle after graduation with a full-time position at the corp lab.
Ruili says that the software skills she picked up from designing 3D models during her corp lab internship have been useful in her current work drafting visual plans of machine parts.
“At the HP-NTU lab, I also got a more in-depth understanding of how researchers conduct their experiments, which was very different from the lab work we did in class,” adds Ruili, who is now a mechanical engineer at a multinational corporation.
Cutting-edge research
Hands-on experience working in up-and-coming fields like autonomous vehicles is another corp lab perk. This was so for Mehal Agarwal, 22, who interned for a year at the Continental-NTU Corp Lab in 2021. She graduated in 2021 with a degree in electrical and electronic engineering.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can help autonomous vehicles detect nearby objects, such as pedestrians and other vehicles, so that the driverless vehicles can, for example, avoid colliding into them. But this requires training the system with many relevant images of the objects – a costly and time-consuming endeavour, especially if the images are manually annotated.
A program Mehal designed during her internship addressed this by automatically filtering and tagging images with relevant objects from a large database for further manual processing. Details such as the visibility of the objects in the images were also captured, thanks to additional functions she added to an existing tool.
Cultivating soft skills
Beyond technical knowledge, Mehal, who is now a software developer in a research centre in Singapore, also picked up work-related soft skills when she interned at the Continental-NTU Corp Lab. She honed her communication and project management skills as she regularly updated her supervisors on the progress of her project.
Mr Sumit Sahoo, a senior programme manager at the Rolls-Royce@NTU Corp Lab, says that an internship at the lab allows students to gain insights into “how business needs and customer requirements support the research and development of new technologies and processes”.
“The internship will also impart skills on managing stakeholders and expectations that are necessary for the smooth and successful translation of research into potential industrial applications,” he adds.
This story was published in the Jan-Feb 2023 issue of HEY!. To read it and other stories from this issue in print, click here.
