Mark Lindsey, a senior majoring in Electrical Engineering, recently returned from a year-long internship and study abroad program in Nanjing, China. While there, he was able to develop his skills as an engineer, as well as experience the culture of China.
Mark spent six months studying Chinese and engineering at Nanjing University. Although the engineering class he took—Signals and Systems—was a class he had taken previously at BYU, this class, and others too, seemed different from his American classes.
“The school was very different. The content was all the same because it’s science, but the teaching style was all different. Here we usually have three class periods a week, one hour each. There they had one class period a week, three hours in a row in a terrible room with really hard chairs. It was just a straight-up lecture.”
The lecture wasn’t the only difference between the school systems. The student-teacher interaction was minimal and the structure of the grades varied significantly.
“If any students had any questions, they would have to talk to the professor before or after class or during breaks. They also required us to memorize everything; we didn’t get a formula sheet or anything like that, which is significant for Signals and Systems. That made it really hard to take tests. The homework didn’t contribute to the grade at all—it was just a midterm and a final.”
Amidst the studying for tests and doing homework, Mark enjoyed the opportunity to discuss the differences between the two school systems with his professor.
“It was really cool to be able to talk to the professor that taught my engineering class. He came up to me almost immediately when we met and asked me about differences between what happens in a Chinese classroom versus an American classroom—there’s a lot. It was interesting to get his perspective on why they did things the way they did in the classroom and things they wish they could change, but they can’t because of different circumstances.”
After his six-month study abroad at Nanjing University, Mark was hired as an intern for Ericsson, where he worked on test development.
Mark explained about the company, “Ericsson is one of the biggest companies in Sweden. They do telecommunications and used to make phones with Sony, but they don’t anymore. Right now, they mostly make transceivers for cell phone towers.”
During his internship, he worked in test development for these transceivers. Transceivers are devices that can transmit and receive signals, such as those on the cell phone towers. Since Ericsson is updating their products so frequently, tests are required often.
“There’s a good basis for testing because the product has been around for a long time, but as they update the product, we need to update the test [suite] and make sure it interfaces well with the product and actually tests in the right specifications.”
Getting the right specifications required work on Mark’s part.
He explained the process for the testing: “There are a lot of parameters they need to test, so they have big test benches that have a whole bunch of measurement tools. All these different tools are all set up together nicely. You just plug all of them into the transceiver and then you run tests through software, so the software controls all the hardware to run the tests.”
As an intern, his daily schedule revolved around these tests.
“In the mornings, I would update the parameter files that we were testing to match the new transceiver parameters,” he said. “Then I would go downstairs to the lab where all the test benches were, find the transceiver we needed, put it on a cart, push it over to the test bench, then plug in all the wires and run the test.”
Running these tests proved to be important to the development of the product.
“Probably 99 times out of 100, it would fail because the product was new, and the parameters varied significantly different from the previous versions. A lot of the modules we were using were not great, and it was older test equipment.”
Because of the testing Mark did while serving as an intern in China, he has been able to apply some of the things he learned into his Capstone project.
“Ericsson had a very well-organized test layout where it tested a lot of parameters, which is something we should probably do with our products we are designing here, even though we just don’t have as good of a set-up necessarily,” he said. “I learned a lot of concepts about wireless communication and telecommunications from working at Ericsson even though I wasn’t actually designing anything to do with that.”
Being back in the American school system at BYU, he expressed gratitude for the opportunity to go to China and experience the culture there.
Mark served in the Taiwan Taichung Mission where he was able to practice the Chinese he learned in high school. After returning from his mission, he has been studying Electrical Engineering. He plans to graduate April 2019, then attend graduate school.