An Undergraduate Intern's Experience With Industrial Instrumentation And The Effect On Teaching

A simulation of the Time Keeping System(TKS) on the Global Positioning System s at llite was developed to duplicate the characteristics of the hardware. This software aided in the design and testing of the hardware. This paper discusses the instrumentation and the testing of the TKS hardware and associated software by an undergradu ate engineering student. It includes the problems she had, how she changed the simulation to match the hardware, and how this experience helped further her Engineering edu cation. The TKS consisted of a hybrid analog/digital phase locked loop contro lling a Voltage Controlled Crystal Oscillator, with an atomic clock reference. The engineering development model and the final hardware/software combination had minor differences. The Student had to design the tests, the test setup, and run the tests on a system accurate to one sec ond in thirty-one centuries. The undergradu ate student’s internship experience at ITT not only helped her in her studies the following year, but allowed her instructor to observe the development of an Electrical Engineering student, between her sophomore and Junior year of college, in an actual i ndustrial environment. This resulted in a modification of the teaching techniques used by the instructor in classes taken by s ophomore engineering students. Introduction Companies usually support internships for students between their junior and senior years of college. This is done for two reasons: the first is that they feel that students between their sophomore and junior years do not have a sufficient engineering background and the second is that they use the internships to evalu ate whether or not they want to hire the student after graduation. The professor wanted the company to hire students between their sophomore and junior years for three reasons: the first was to see if they have a sufficient background to perform useful engineering work for a company; the second was to see how the experience would aff ect the interning student’s attitude toward