Nanophotonics is a branch of optical engineering that uses nanoscale structures to control photons. The ability to control photons opens up new possibilities in quantum chips, sensors, lenses, and holograms for the AR/VR world. One way that photons can be manipulated is by using a metasurface. A metasurface starts off…

Randy interned as a hardware systems engineer at Apple in Cupertino, California, United States. Keep reading to learn more about his co-op journey, what his job is like, and how to land a job in hardware! How did you get to where you are today? At the start of first year, I joined the Waterloo Rocketry student design team…

Hardware engineering is a sub-discipline of electrical engineering, which focuses on the development of the electronics inside various technologies. Electronics are most commonly developed onto printed circuit boards, also known as PCBs. Most technological devices around you have PCBs, as any software cannot run without the necessary hardware. If you’ve…

Anna interned as a battery characterization engineer at QuantumScape, a company in San Jose, California, USA, that develops solid state lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles. …

Typical batteries are composed of several components including an electrolyte, anode, cathode, and a porous separator membrane. Battery characterization involves using various techniques to understand the performance of your design and the unwanted side processes that may occur as these materials interact in operation over a typical lifecycle. Through this analysis, changes to the fabrication and build procedure can be made to optimize the design, yielding a battery suitable for consumer use. For example, atomic force microscopy (AFM) can be applied to image cathode samples and determine the conductive area in post-processing. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) can also be used to determine what elements are present in a sample and to find interfering impurities so the pathway to their introduction can be mitigated.

Rachel interned as a machine learning engineer at Cyclica, a drug discovery company in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Keep reading to learn more about her co-op journey, what it was like working on the data, web platform, and machine learning teams, and her advice for breaking into software! How did you get to where you are today? Being determined and…

Imagine if we could invent the vaccines of tomorrow faster, better, and for cheaper. Well, this is not a dream but a reality with artificial intelligence (AI) based drug discovery. Traditionally, it takes more than a decade and about $1 billion dollars for a new drug to leave the lab…

Yashveer was a materials engineering intern at Formlabs, the largest supplier of professional stereolithography and selective laser sintering 3D printers in the world, headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA. …

3D printing is becoming more and more prevalent in this day and age as it allows for detailed 3D models to easily come to life in a matter of hours using a 3D printer. For engineers as well, this tool is proving to be immensely powerful for quickly developing design…