Our CEO is Carl Bass. Carl once said "'If I ask a Product Manager, can our product do this?' He always responds 'Of course it can do that.' I want to know from real world experience what our products can and cannot do. I look to experts who take on special projects that demonstrate the power of what we build and the realistic limitations as well." It's with that spirit in mind that we hire interns to come in during the summer, put Fusion 360 through its paces, and report back to our CEO and the Fusion 360 team. This is our fourth summer of fabrication.

This year our interns include:

• Ali Ahmed

  

  Ali is working on his bachelors degree in mechanical engineering. He will graduate from George Washington University in 2018. He has lots of experience with AutoCAD and 3D Printing. One of his projects was using MATLAB to compute a more optimal gearbox ratio for a Baja race vehicle and then designing, fabricating, and installing the metal gears. He's even mentored a freshman-founded company that is developing a 3D printed violin.

  

  Ali let me know that poetry is his inspiration to be an engineer and that when he's not engineering, he's writing his first book. He's hopeful his efforts add more flavor to his life outside of mathematics and physics.

• Brittany Presten

  

  Brittany is a glutton for punishment. This is her sixth year interning at Autodesk (started in high school) where she has done stints with our Gallery and Bio/Nano teams. Last summer she was one of our Fusion 360 interns, and we are glad to have her back. Her final project last summer was an Arduino-powered robotic glove where one wearer could control the finger movements of the other wearer. This would come in handy for teaching someone to play piano. Brittany is just starting to pursue her masters in biomechanical engineering at Stanford.

  

• Connor Freeman

  

  Since Connor attends UC Berkeley, and Brittany attends Stanford, I'll guess we'll see the sparks fly. Actually, that won't be the case as the internship requires collaboration among the teammates using Fusion 360 as the nexus. Connor is majoring in mechanical engineering and will graduate in 2018. He has experience with AutoCAD, Fusion 360, and MATLAB. He's a shop assistant at school, so my guess is that he's seen other students make every kind of fabrication mistake that can possibly be made and knows what “not to do.” Connor is currently designing and fabricating a live object LED wire that's hooked up to an Arduino which fluctuates and glows according to incoming Twitter data.

  

• Eni Asebiomo

  

  Eni is majoring in mechanical engineering and computer science at Stanford. I guess he and Brittany can gang up on Connor. What have I done with our intern hiring process? He's been working with Raspberry Pi as well as studying materials, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics. He assembled his own 3D printer and then modified it (designing and fabricating new/replacement parts) to print with pre-melted chocolate. It will be interesting to see what he and the other interns cook up this summer.

  

In our first year of interns, we allowed the interns to work on whatever they wanted. At the end of their internship, they remarked how much they loved the experience and were wowed by how much freedom they were given. This was great, but our CEO really wished they had collaborated more. So for the two years that followed, we allowed the interns to work on whatever they wanted, as long as they had to collaborate. Ideally, they would design something where TAB A fits into SLOT B and one intern works on TAB A and another works on SLOT B. This has turned out great for the last two years. Projects have included an asthma inhaler, 3D print cleanup tool, robotic glove, and a foldable bicycle helmet.

When working on the robotic glove last year, the interns expressed a desire for the software to do more in terms of overall system design. Our CEO suggested that we look into that this summer. Given that Brittany was part of the team last year, rather than her repeat the same experience, she could analyze Fusion 360 and its intersection with our Dreamcatcher project, robotics, or human parametrics. Ali, Connor, and Eni could develop some type of mechanical system using our latest software, fabricate it, identify what they liked about the process, and define their dream software for areas where our solutions still have shortcomings.

It’s going to be an interesting summer.