Internships at HaiLa

Years ago, someone took a chance on me with an engineering internship.? I had no connections, there was not an internet as we know it today, I literally got a phone book found the companies in the area I could commute to, and I drove around with my very thin CV and dropped it off.? I have always felt lucky that an engineer named Bruce Miller called me back and I got my first internship.

Every company I have been with has supported internships, co-ops or work terms.? I believe it is incredibly important to do so.? It feels a bit like giving back but in reality, we benefit a great deal from supporting young people who are working to find their career path.? Selfishly we get to meet young people and see if they are capable of what we need and more often than not they surprise us with their dedication, talent and enthusiasm to learn.

This internship period (Summer ’24) HaiLa has 3 of these talented interns.

At our Montreal office we have a returning intern, Maximillian Railton who is at 加拿大麦吉尔大学 completing his Computer Engineering Degree and we have Amelia Dalvito , a Barnard College /Columbia Computer Science student from NYC.? In our Ottawa Office we have Amelia Percival who is Computer Systems Engineering student from 加拿大卡尔顿大学 (my alma mater). Each of them has impressed me, surprised me and contributed to our technology sprints.

Maxx has worn many hats in our engineering team.? He went from doing radiated coverage testing, supporting events and configuring technology demonstrations to writing code for our system.? He can collaborate with the team effectively and has proven to us that he understands both the hardware and software best practices we strive for.

When I first met Amelia (Montreal) she was excited to take on as many challenging projects as she could.? As a first time intern at HaiLa she learned our what our chips do and their supporting hardware, the software and took on specific software projects that would improve our evaluation kit that goes to prospect customers.? Her implementation of backscatter polling period status will help us internally as well.

In our Ottawa office, Amelia has been an intern in our digital design team.? She quickly came up to speed on our EDA tools and worked to run critical tests again and again to move the design of our next chip forward.? She is working closely with our Digital team to learn our latest design, memory implementation and MCU.? She has been instrumental in maturing our design.

I hope that all three of our interns are having a great experience at HaiLa.? While they are working on specific tasks, they have told me that they have learned more about how an idea forms into an enterprise.? Each of them are working on aspects of what will go to market.? I do not believe in side projects to teach an intern.? It’s best they work on exactly what we need to deliver, feel part of the pressure on the team and take the ups and downs of any project in the same way all of the HaiLa team does.

I hope they all come back but I understand that they want many experiences as they complete their studies and I am happy to be their reference if they so choose.