About New Wave:
Originally founded to source hard-to-find components for the military and aerospace industry, New Wave Design and Verification (NWDV) has since expanded, now creating high speed interface devices for aircraft. With a handful of defense contractors making up a majority of their clientele, NWDV is growing exponentially. To help build their workforce, this small electronics firm hires STEM college students through the SciTech Internship Program.

“SciTech is a really great tool, it’s helped us a lot,” said Inam Haque NWDV’s director of engineering operations. “I’ve found really good candidates from SciTech. I’ve found that people here are very focused and motivated and know what they want. That’s why they put their resumes on SciTech. I really admire the work that [SciTech] does, helping the whole industry by providing the talent that’s on [their] website.”  

About the interns:
This summer they hired Nathan Buhr and Michael Drais, both computer engineering majors. NWDV has internal and external projects and they typically try to distribute these between interns to give them a variety of exposure. Buhr was assigned a client-facing project while Drais worked on internal automation development.

Buhr started his internship by conducting a lot of research to prepare for the client’s project. “The first week I would describe as information overload,” he said. By comparison, “the sheer amount of information that you don’t learn in school is astronomical.”

Once he was caught up in his research, Buhr jumped right in, working on verification tasks for a few weeks before eventually developing an interface module of his own. This involved writing code to advance a protocol’s functionality.

“Coding is the best. Especially working with a real product, it feels tangible,” Buhr said. “I’ve always liked taking things apart to figure out how they work. Watching a computer transform, working with different operating systems, troubleshooting, it’s fun.”

This was Drais’ second internship at NWDV. This time around he helped develop an automation system designed to test files and check for errors, transforming it from a basic pass-fail report to one that can gather more precise information.

“Setting up automation can be annoying, but once it works it’s really satisfying,” Drais said proudly. And his efforts at NWDV have not gone unappreciated.      

“Michael has been a key part in implementing this with our senior engineers.” Haque confirmed.

Get involved
Make an impact on a future STEM professional’s life and strengthen your talent pipeline. Start planning your internship today at scitechmn.org. At least 200 wage matches are available on a first come, first hire basis between now and August 2021.

Are you a returning student? The new program year is underway! Reactivate your account and start applying for internships today.

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