Autodesk hosts a lot of interns over the summer. We have high school and college students who help us with our marketing, sales, development, testing, financial, and customer support efforts. Though there are a few still hanging around, for most of them, Friday was their final day. As such, we had end-of-internship presentations.

Each presentation basically covered:

• Who the students were
• What school and grade level they would be in this fall
• What problem they tackled
• How it turned out
• If they were in charge of Autodesk, they would...

Our department had 21 presentations from 30 interns. Some of them worked on projects together and shared their joint results. Using teleconferencing, we had interns present from Toronto, New York, and San Francisco.

Here are some of the topics from our interns in San Francisco.

• Ali Ahmed, Connor Freeman, Eni Asebiomo

  

  Thanks to Jim Thomas and the team at Sensel for loaning us a device so the interns could experiment with controlling the 3D printed OctoPod.

• Brittany Presten

  

• Zach Jagoda

  

• Abhishek Bhatia, Ardavan Bidgoli, Bharath Satheesh, Ireti Akinola

  

• Nik Bentel

  

• Lisa Soros,Chin-Yi Cheng

  

• Himanshu Rasam

  

• Danfei Xu

  

• Nick Merrill

  

• Dave Yan,Ethan Arnowitz, John Scheeler, Phan Lee

  

• Panagiotis Achlioptas

  

• Rupal Khilari

  

Clearly, none of the interns were assigned to "Go get us coffee." These presentations were more than the typical first-day-back-to-school writing assignments on "How I spent my summer vacation."

Years ago, I took an effective business presentation skills class once. All I can recall from the class is PEGS:

• P - Posture (stand up straight)
• E - Enunciate (say words clearly and modulate your voice in volume and tone)
• G - Gestures (make one and two hand gestures to reinforce your words)
• S - Smile

The interns did a great job even without the training. Oh, the things they must teach in schools nowadays.

Presentation skills are alive in the lab.