Software Engineering Intern at BAE Systems
This summer, I have a software engineering internship at BAE Systems in Hudson, New Hampshire. BAE Systems is a British-headquartered military defense contracting company that globally operates across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Israel, India, and Saudi Arabia. It was ranked third in the world among arms industry companies in total military sales in 2014. The company has approximately 84,600 employees with the majority located within the Electronic Systems (ES) sector, which is headquartered in my hometown of Nashua, NH and has other U.S. locations in New England, New York, Virginia, Texas, and California. I have been interning with the company since last June, when I began working for a team attempting to optimize the tracking of the company’s assets through radio frequency identification (RFID). RFID is widely considered a major improvement to barcode and is popular at several major companies and organizations including Walmart, 3M, Bell, and the U.S. Department of Defense. RFID tags are used to track items and various data associated with them.
I have been working with three other interns this summer. Our daily tasks revolve around modifying, organizing, and cleaning up the database of all the assets within ES, testing various tags’ strength and effectiveness for their use in labs and storage areas, documenting my work and findings in MS Excel and PowerPoint for other members of the project team and company, and physically placing tags on equipment. Beyond work with my project team, I am also involved with the company’s intern project. All ES interns across engineering, finance, operations, and information management form ten-member teams and collaborate on a project idea that can lead to some kind of improvement for the company. At the beginning of August, each intern team presents their idea and findings to company executives, including the President of ES. The project provides all interns the opportunity to meet and work with other interns throughout the summer. Along with the intern project, the company also organizes bi-weekly information sessions about the company and various professional development topics. The internship experience at BAE Systems is excellent and I’ve met many fun and intelligent people in the past year working for the company, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in working in the military and defense industry.