Intern Spotlight: Sasha
Schooling:
Candidate BFA, Fine Arts & Communication, RISD where she is also the Team Lead for RISD’s Rover NASA HERC Team.
How has your role as an NBRR intern evolved since you started?
I started as an intern last fall, working on an Augmented Reality (AR) tool for collaboration between artists and engineers. I worked on figuring out how to connect the old Microsoft HoloLens software to newer AR app programs and learned about the specificities of UI/UX for Augmented Reality. This summer, I’m working on forged carbon fiber, which has been much more hands-on. This has been a chance to learn how to use CAD to design for manufacturing on a prototype scale.
Can you speak to the real-world applications of what you’ve learned in your Art & Design Computation studies at RISD to your intern work at NBRR?
The studio environment has a workflow that really applies to any sort of problem solving or part design, starting with sketches, to CAD, to scaling, to a final part. Scaling up gives you the opportunity to experiment and iterate at different levels of fidelity without making a giant full-scale piece each time, and that’s a skill I get to practice a lot in my classes.
Art & Computation is about experimentation, taking the programs and computers that are used every day and trying something new. This has taught me that being the least knowledgeable about something isn’t always a disadvantage. When you don’t know anything, there are a lot less limitations on what ideas you can have and also a lot less expectations.
What NBRR activities/events have you been involved in as an intern?
Beyond my intern project, I was able to do a weeklong ABB fellowship training, learning to operate the cobots and use their software to simulate motions and environments.
Can you talk a little about your experiences with success, failure and risk taking?
I was pretty nervous at first about my lack of engineering background. I had to reprint the mold I worked on many times because of small mistakes or oversights. But that’s a part of the design process, both in engineering and in art. There’s a lot of iteration and redesigning, and some mistakes you can only really learn by doing. Looking back at those first designs, I’ve absorbed a lot of new information, whether it be about composites, 3D printing or CAD.
What skills have you developed through the NBRR Internship Program?
There’s a lot of diversity to the experiences I’ve had as an intern over the last 3 years. I’m constantly problem solving, which is very important in my field. I’ve also learned about the hands-on aspects of computer science like electronics, hardware integration, robot specific programming quirks, and programming languages made for specific robots that we use at NBRR. I’ve also gotten to collaborate a lot, whether that’s on a project or an event or during an educational activity.
What skills did you learn that you hadn’t anticipated?
I have a lot of new tools for documenting and organizing projects! The project log and tracker sheet provided me with many ways to stay on top of to-do’s, note observations or modifications, and keep track of how much time was spent on different steps. I’m excited to apply these methods to the Rover Club back at RISD, as these will help us stay on track and delegate work as a team. The final report and presentation also taught me a lot about how to document and write about a project, which is crucial in all fields.
What do you hope to do when you graduate and how do you think the work you’ve done as an intern at NBRR will help you reach those goals?
A lot of what I make at RISD is looking at the visual elements of modern science equipment–ROV’s, lasers, bathymeters, sensors of all kinds–and exploring the artistic sensibilities of scientists and researchers. NBRR has sort of confirmed that for me. I loved bringing my fine arts background into a technical space. Even just having an internship like this on my resume helps me explain to others what I’m interested in and what I do. I found that spaces like NBRR, where art and community isn’t seen as separate from science, is very inspiring. I hope to work somewhere similar in the future, maybe on a research vessel.
