And classes resumed, without much of fanfare. Nothing new there, except for the thesis. I have never been so lost in my thesis. Also I had to finish my report about my internship at Nokia Bell Labs. It kind of sucks because we are graded on our internship which means we have to write a report and make a presentation of the work that we did.
A typical internship is 6-7 weeks. 8 hours per day. So anything between 240-280 hours spent. Writing the report is another 10-15 hours. Lets take 10 hours. So roughly 290 hours. Another 5 hours for the presentation. So in all, we have to spend 300 hours on the internship and all associated activities. One credit roughly equals 25-30 hours of work. So 300 hours should be anything between 10 and 12 credits. But we are only given 6 credits. [Source: https://ec.europa.eu/education/sites/education/files/ects-users-guide_en.pdf ]
For me this is really annoying.
But lets talk about the internship. The people in Bell Labs are nice people. But the work I did there was more like research as opposed to actual analog design. Honestly, that is fine by me. I worked for three years in a major analog design firm and I have had enough of the “experience” in a huge multi-national company. But what I did not like too much about the internship was that the specifications were not well defined as the beginning. Which makes it really difficult to work on something. And I was sick as well, but I had to push through. It is something I did not let the people there see.
But I think the star of this blog was Brecht Francois. A brilliant guy, with a PhD in power amplifiers from KU Leuven (his guide was Patrick Reynaert who is the top authority on power amplifiers, especially in the mmWave domain). He understood the limitations, had good discussions and it was really nice working with him.
So will I ever go back to Bell Labs? Well yes, if I can get to work with Brecht.
Unfortunately, I cannot talk about my work there (for confidentiality reasons). A big shout out to Jie Yang who was also interning at Bell Labs and was from KUL. The only friend I had there really.
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