It is coming to the end of my internship. Two more weeks left, which reminds me again that if I listened to my advisor back then to take only 12 weeks, it should be over at this time. Never can I imagined that the two more weeks are not more happy hanging out time with my California friends, nor two more delightful weeks with decent foods in California. Now, two more weeks are just two more weeks working from home, feeling the never ending unexcited daily life with unchallenged and trivial work. Yes, this blog is about complaining. Complaining about my internship. Before going into the theme, let me just quickly update a good but also bad news. The conference paper I submitted in May got accepted. The conference will be held in Taipei in December, … if everything goes as planned. I am 96 percent sure now this conference will go virtually, just as every conference in 2020 does. So I lose another free flight this year, this one to Taiwan. Fuck. It really hurt. Well done 2020! I keep feeling kind of moyamoya mood during the entire internship, but every time when I tried to explain to someone why I feel so frustrated, I found it difficult to delineate it clearly. First, it is not easy to not go into the details to talk about the project I work on, and why I don’t like the job they assign to me. Second, even I want to use other example to illustrate the idea, I found that my expression ability is not good enough to convey the idea in my head. Therefore, I think the best way is to write it down as a blog. In this way I can take time finding the best words to express my feeling. The project itself is okay. I’m not sure how much I could share, but I think at least I can say something about what I will put on my resume. I am working on mmWave 5G modem chip, about a system block that is related to FCC regulation. I can feel that this technology is extremely important on the performance of mmWave, which is a very advanced technology in 5G. However, the job I was assigned is quite boring. Basically, the system is already designed and implemented, and what I should to do is to evaluate the performance of this system in a special mode. My main job is to run the MATLAB code simulation, sometime find some bugs, try different configuration parameters and show the results. To be more specific, but not going into details, my job is to evaluate the performance of part A. However, the whole system is the combination of A and B. Part A uses some algorithm to determine a way to retrieve some important information for B, and then part B will use this as input to do final calculation and decide the final output of the system. Therefore, in short words, A and B both have influence on the performance, and the optimal way is to design them jointly. But if B is not good enough, then testing different parameters on A is meaningless. Therefore, in my viewpoint, the real problem is B, but I am asked to evaluate or even improve A. I don’t like this because it seems like I am not solving the real problem, but instead just trying some random solution to see if the performance is improved. Under this arrangement, even I have something to say on B, my mentor always just tell me to focus on A because this is what they want me to do. And if I have some idea, it is even harder to make them do the real change. I think probably this is a common problem for big company, because every single thing is related to multiple teams, and once something is settled down, they don’t want to change. I don’t think this is a problem, if the decision made before is correct. However, in many situations, the decision made at that time is because of some timeline pressure. For example, doing this proposal is hard for the software team to implement it in time, so instead they decide to go with a simplified version, which took away some important features. Once this decision is made, even in the future we have time to implement the original proposal, sometime they will just go with the old one because they don’t want to redo what have been done. The only way to make this happen is someone big say we must revisit the problem. Therefore, as a small nobody intern, I just feel powerless and very hard to talk through somebody. Another super annoying thing is that I found it hard to discuss with my mentor. Maybe one problem is that I haven’t got time long enough to build up my reputation, so he tends to not take all my words at first. But more importantly, even if I try to use reasoning and logic to show some ideas against his thought, he still won’t believe. On the other hand, if I show something (e.g. simulation results) that follows his thought, it won’t take a second for him to believe it even if there is no solid support on it. This kind of discussion process makes me feel uncomfortable. As an engineer we should always follow logic and math rule, not random simulation that might have lots of bugs. Talking about simulation. Yes, most of my job this summer is simulation. And it was boring as hell. They have the algorithms done, but not sure about the parameters configuration. I know doing simulation is very important to test and select the algorithms, however, in many cases I feel a little bit of uneasiness. The system model for the simulation is kind of arbitrary and too intuitive, which I think cannot capture the realistic scenarios in the real world. In this case once the model is overthrown the whole simulation becomes incorrect and useless. To me doing this kind of simulation is both boring and not very meaningful. I therefore started to think that what the perfect job should look like for me. The project itself should be interesting, of course. The goal and methodology of the work should be sound and well defined. The content of the work should be finding and solving problems with me proposing my own idea, not just be overwhelmed by assigned boring and unchallenged trivial simulation. I can discuss the project with my colleagues using logic, and whoever is right should win the final argument. Well… these sound a lot, but I really do think these are very important. Anyway now I am back continuing my PhD life (because this blog takes me one month to write so …). I didn’t learn much during this internship, but I did get the best chance to explore and reflect what I really want for the future. So now the problem is, what should I do for the next summer? — first written on 8/22, and now I finally finished it on 9/20
1 Comment
8/2/2022 11:46:37 pm
Really informative article, I had the opportunity to learn a lot, thank you. https://www.takipcikenti.com/instagram/turk-takipci/
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