Heliogen

Manufacturing Engineering Intern

June - August 2021 • Alhambra, CA

What I liked

I loved the culture at this company and how welcoming everyone was. The full-time employees answered my questions, included me socially, and treated my work as valuable and worthwhile. I had a lot of freedom in deciding the direction of my work and the type of projects that I worked on.

What I wish was different

Advice

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Simulation Engineer Intern

June - September 2020 • Pasadena, CA

What I liked

The company culture was very collaborative, laidback, and open. We had weekly and daily team check-ins where everyone could share their plans of the week/what they were working on for the day. People were always constantly bouncing off feedback from one another, and I always felt comfortable asking my coworkers and my boss for help when I ran into trouble during work. My mentor was amazing, helpful, and dedicated. I was given a lot of flexibility in structuring my internship, which meant that I had a lot of say over what I wanted to do, and I could take ownership of the work that I did. We had daily 1:1s which really helped with outlining the course for my work considering the insane number of questions I had about the codebase or going about implementing a certain feature. My mentor constantly reminded me to take breaks and to take time off on the weekends or on weeknights, and thus I didn't feel pressured to overwork myself. There was a variety of projects that I worked on, and each of them required some mathematical/physics background on top of programming experience due to the nature of the subject matter. Ultimately, each small feature felt meaningful and contributed to the needs of the company, and I was very satisfied with the work I did during the internship.

What I wish was different

Due to the nature of the company being a startup, the expectations and the specifications of the projects were always changing. It would've been nice to have a clearer sense of what I would be working in the summer and how the internship was going to be structured (for ease of mind), but it's not a big issue since the flexibility of the projects meant that you had a lot of options to choose from. Due to Covid-19, my internship was remote so I didn't get a lot of time to chat or network with other people in the company, but this was unavoidable. The codebase was at times very confusing due to a lack of comments, good coding practices, or major code duplication. A lot of the time I spent was, unfortunately, trying to figure out what the relevant code needed for my features was doing, which could've been avoided if there was better documentation.

Advice

Don't be shy to ask questions! The smaller start-up environment means it's a lot easier for you to get answers to your questions, so avoid spending a lot of time being stuck one single problem or bug. In the first 2 weeks, I felt very lost due to the large codebase and the deeply technical nature of the work. Make sure you take some time to learn the background material and to explore the codebase to avoid potentially duplicating existing code. I learned a lot about heliostat kinematics and field simulation at the end of my internship, which I wouldn't have been able to during school.

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Mechanical Engineering Intern

June 2018 • Pasadena, CA

What I liked

All incredibly friendly, crazy smart engineers makes for a great work environment. Lots of really cool problems being solved on a daily basis.

What I wish was different

I could have used more guidance with explanations of projects and work done before I arrived. The first couple weeks I felt like I was playing a lot of catch-up with respect to the details of the projects being done at the company and how my work fit in to them.

Advice

Ask a ton of questions because many people at the company have very broad and impressive experience as engineers and innovators. It's possible to learn a ridiculous amount of stuff here.

1 One person found this helpful