Yazaki North America is a member of the Yazaki Group: an independent automotive component designer and manufacturer. Yazaki produces wire harnesses, power distribution and control products, connectors, driver information systems, sensors, and hybrid and electric vehicle products. Yazaki has offices in 45 countries, with a total of nearly 279,800 employees.

For my internship, I worked in the Electronics and Instrumentation Business Unit (EIBU), as part of the Advanced Development team. The primary focus of the EIBU was in developing instrument clusters (the collection of gauges and screens located beind the steering wheel) for clients. Specifically, the Advanced Development team used leading technologies to build innovative prototypes such as large, moveable LCD screens, and Heads Up Displays (HUDs).

I worked on several projects throughout my summer internship, collaborating with other interns as well as full-time employees. For the main project that I worked on throughout the summer, I partnered with an Electrical Engineering Intern to design, program, and debug (both software and hardware) a microcontroller that acted as the interface between encoded video input and a LCD screen. I also researched and tested Near Field Communication (NFC) to try to determine if it was viable technology that had any uses in the automotive industry.

At the very beginning of the summer, Yazaki divided all of the interns into teams of seven. Each team was a mixture of departments and disciplines. We were to pick one technology that we thought would play an important role in shaping the future of the automotive industry. Over the course of the summer we researched and investigated this technology, and created a prototype to demonstrate the technology and its application. At the end, we presented our prototype, as well as all of our ideas and research to the department heads.

RiskMetrics Group, LLC

Software Engineering Intern

RistMetrics is involved in modeling and predicting risk on financial assets. The core product of RiskMetrics is its RiskManager: a cloud service risk system that integrates consistently-modeled market data with analytical models. In June of 2010, RiskMetrics Group, LLC was quired by MSCI Inc.

As an Intern, I spent my summer developing an internal tool that provided a GUI for large, complex XML files. Before I was hired, employees had to create and edit these XML files by hand. To build this standalone application I used Java and the Standard Widget Toolkit created by Eclipse. I also implemented some advanced features by hand, including Drag-and-Drop, and Undo/Redo functionality.