My Experience with Experience
Anushree Chakravarty, Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, Level 3
You need experience to gain experience.
A quote that provides an honest representation of today’s job market; it is infuriating. It perpetuates myths and rumours such as “only paid experiences count” or “job experience alone will get me the position”, but it’s not all doom and gloom! By the end of this article, I hope to share the importance of gathering experience through unpaid opportunities. Also remember, instead of worrying about rumours, you can always reach out to the Engineering Co-op and Career Services (ECCS) office to get more accurate information about co-ops or how to use some of their services.
This topic hits close to home since I didn’t have a single job to my name prior to university. I never worked at a grocery store or helped at a restaurant, and I’ll be honest, I felt inferior. It did not help that I did not immediately get a co-op placement in the summer following my first year as I had hoped. I planned to gain the experience I needed to work in industry during my upper years. However, at this point I was left wondering: What could those without job experience do while hunting for engineering co-op positions?
They can use their experiences with clubs and teams. McMaster University has over 300 clubs and teams to hone transferable and technical skills. MES clubs can be found here and MSU clubs can be found here.
If there is not a club or team that attracts your attention, create a new one! Just this year, a friend and I created HealthHatch, a new MES-affiliated biomedical engineering club geared towards providing students technical experience through design projects. Co-founding this club has provided me with management experience, communication skills, and networking skills in the months since its inception. I’m sure through cultivating other peoples’ projects and ideas, I will continue to develop further.
Clubs are underrated; the curiosity, the deliverables, and the community all provide something towards building a heftier resume. Regardless of the nature of the club, technical or not, if someone shows drive towards making the club better, passion for what the club stands for, and dedication to its mission, then they can gain experiences which would look amazing in a resume or cover letter or during an interview. Non-technical clubs are great for developing transferable skills such as time management, collaboration, and communication. These traits are necessary for an engineer regardless of their sector. The best part is that clubs come with low risk and thus are a great place to try new things and branch out of one’s comfort zone.
Technical clubs are great for providing both technical and transferable skills. For example, a friend of mine is the VP Engineering on McMaster Mars Rover Team (MMRT) and the Electrical Power Systems (EPS) Lead on NEUDOSE. In his time with MMRT, he has been able to learn battery power systems, integration of mechanical and motor constraints, and work on rover communication from over one kilometer away. Using this experience, he has been able to excel in his co-ops with both Kepler and Tenstorrent.
Specifically, he decided to build boards in-house rather than getting COTS (commercial off the shelf). Building boards gave him experience that put him above the rest. During his interview and application, he talked about debugging, designing, and building boards with MMRT which gave him the ability to do similar work professionally with Kepler. The amazing part is that the learning is circular, after gaining professional experience working with boards, he brought it back to MMRT.
Another friend of mine has been involved with McMaster’s Rocketry Club for two months. In these few months as the Ground Control Software Specialist, he has been given the responsibility to work on building the visualizer for the avionics data, along with the ground control’s module. The club is not using any external software and is building it from scratch. Through the rocketry club, he has learned about modularization and telemetry to build a real-time rocket monitoring system.
All these skills that one learns and puts into their arsenal are important in one way or another. During a co-op, problems will appear out of nowhere and it will be the transferable skills like working in a fast-paced environment, collaboration, and problem-solving that come in handy. Club experiences, both technical and non-technical, are great for situation-based interview questions. In the end, clubs provide something we all need: a supporting environment to learn and develop as engineers, students, and humans.
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