Youth Technician Intern

A summer in Janicki’s automation shop, on the electrical side of a large composite test system.

I built, wired, and QC-tested more than 50 electrical subsystems. Everything had to meet industrial build-quality and wire-management standards set by the customer. The bar: our final products should be serviceable years in the future by whomever is sent to service them. This work is under NDA too, so that’s about as specific as I can get.

What the standards actually mean

Good wire management doesn’t appear a necessity until something breaks. When every wire is routed the same way, labelled, and strain-relieved, you can find a fault in seconds. When it’s a rat’s nest, you’re tracing wires by hand for hours, every single time. On a system with dozens of subsystems, each of which has dozens more components running behind them, that adds up fast.

QC-testing my own work changed how I built it. Knowing I’d be the one continuity-testing a subsystem an hour later, checking every connection for shorts and breaks, meant I stopped cutting corners I couldn’t see. A weak crimp or a mislabeled wire was mine to find, so it was faster to just do it right the first time. Over a summer of 50-plus subsystems that habit compounds: fewer reworks, fewer faults, and work I’d put my name on.

Why it mattered later

This is the internship that showed me I wanted to be an electrical engineer on the hardware side, rather than a CS developer on the software side. I applied back to Janicki the next summer, and the credibility I’d built on the shop floor is a big part of why they trusted me as one of four members of their brand-new Physical AI team.