DAY IN THE LIFE OF A VEHICLE DESIGN ENGINEER INTERN AT TESLA (IN CALI!)

what's up everyone i'm henry and i'm uh hey everyone welcome back to 16 weeks and i'm about to show you what all right let's forget about the intro my name is henry and i kind of just talk in monotone and i'm about to show you what it's like as a vehicle-to-sun engineering intern at tesla let's go [Music] [Music] so before we get started let's talk a bit about who i am so i don't know do we start with like fun facts or something i'm 20 years old i'm virgo i've never done a vlog before and still getting used to this whole talking to the camera thing i'm sponsored by o'henry which is a chocolate bar company in canada and i've had a lot of pets i was born and raised in taipei and when i was 13 my family and i moved to vancouver where i went to high school and currently i am finishing my second year of mechanical engineering at the university of waterloo while doing an internship at tesla in the san francisco bay area wait you don't know what a tesla is [Music] so tesla designs and manufactures the best electric vehicles on the market and the ecosystems around them as well i'm currently interning on the exterior vehicle design engineering team as the name suggests we work on the parts that are outside on the cars for example the roof the fascia underbody frank spoiler truck bed appliques batches and a lot more on top of that we also do some parts that are on the inside of the car and we call them the underhood components they're really critical in the safety of both the drivers and the pedestrians and vehicle crash events something that initially surprised me a lot is everything that i listed before are done by only eight engineers on the team plus an intern and this brings up the question of what is it like to be an intern at tesla a question that people ask is whether or not tesla treats their interns like an actual engineer and the truth is they don't they treat you like two engineers so i've interned at quite a few different companies before in the past but i've never been given the chance to have this much impact on the products that we're building when i learned about my projects for my mentors i realized that i'm supposed to design like all these pretty important components on the cars and especially one of them will be an industry first like record-breaking feature on the cars that will be making history and i was like wait a second are you sure about this and it took me a while to get used to juggling this much trust and responsibilities but in the end i was able to learn so much from this environment and the things i learned are just simply life-changing i had to come back to canada two weeks ago to apply for a new visa and now i'm about to fly back to the states again to resume working in person [Music] i guess the nice thing about flying in the pandemic is that there are no lines at all [Music] all right i just landed in vancouver airport and i'm gonna use this chance to also stay for a few days and catch up with some friends here yep whatever we'll get our food finished [Music] all right just got my negative test results i've probably done like 10 kg tests in the past month and i'm gonna go check in and apply for my visa so see if it works out right i'm back to the bay area at my uncle's house where i'm staying for the duration of my internship and yeah i'm just gonna like settle down and get ready to go back to office tomorrow and i'll show you how it is peace [Music] all right it is currently tuesday and i am on the way to work right now where i live is around 20 minutes away from fremont where the vehicle engineering office is located and i usually just put autopilot on and enjoy the view while eating breakfast or listening to a podcast alright you probably already saw this coming but unfortunately i'm not allowed to film in the office but to give an idea one thing about the building is that it's a pretty straight building where the engineering teams are sitting like on the left and right of the hallway and whenever you have to walk across the office it's always a cool feeling to like take a quick glance at their screens and know that you know this is like an assembly line of ideas world engineers bring a concept car all the way down to like a completed vehicle design and it's a really cool feeling to just understand that like this is where everything happens where all the tesla vehicles come to life and no i didn't get to meet elon but he does come down here every once in a while to review the new cars or to review any like quality issues or any new vehicle launch events yeah i wish and the fremont tesla factory is actually located like just down the street from our office and we would try to go down there as often as we can to see how the cars are being built if our designs are going according to the plan and yeah it's a really satisfying feeling to know and see that something that you worked on that you actually own is going on to the cars that will be delivered to the customers i actually can't wait for the new cars to come out and see like what i worked on running on the road it'll be such a weird feeling but i'll show you guys by then my favorite part about working in person is probably being able to travel to different places i also had a chance to fly down to la where the tesla and spacex headquarters are located to build some new car prototypes i took the chance to fly down a day earlier to check out some beautiful places in southern california uh [Music] all right so i saw this meme on tick tock a while ago and decided to film this section to explain what we actually do so how long do we make a car does elon just tell us that he wants a triangle on wheels and we just go ahead and make it what do vehicle engineers do every day throughout my seven months of internship at tesla i've been trying to answer these questions for myself through working with different teams even though i'm nowhere close to grasping the whole process fully i'm going to try to keep the nerdy stuff short and try to explain what we do in two minutes so the vehicle design engineers don't actually start designing a car from scratch because unfortunately most of us don't have a great sense of aesthetics every car company has a design studio and the people in there are really good at designing beautiful things they provide us with a digital service model of the car which is essentially an empty shell and it describes what the car should look like and our job as design engineers is to bring this concept car to life so we usually first break the car down into its components and figure out what requirements each component has every requirement has to be met but they can be met in different ways however each requirement is also impacted by another requirement and that's where things start to get messy let me show you an example that i did one of my projects is to design this component with a logo on there for one of the new cars load design studio provided me information on what it should look like on the outside and everyone will work together to generate requirements for this part for instance the gap around the part must be small enough so it doesn't look ugly it also can't be taken off too easily and it has to hold other components on the bottom as well one important rule is that physical things are never perfect something can always be bigger smaller or out of place so how should i mount this thing do i use tape or screws how many do i need and where do i place them so that they can always be perfectly and securely mounted what material do i use to get this shiny color i also need to make sure that the gap on top looks small even when the part is not perfect the final design also can't take too long to install or it's going to slow down the car production speed and essentially our job is to find one solution that can satisfy all these requirements and when we finalize on the design we still have to go through a series of steps to verify it there are even more that goes on behind every one of these steps for example how do we test something that's supposed to be on a car for 30 years in just three months when we finally take the part into production how can we make sure that when we make one million parts all of them will be the same for every aspect that i mentioned previously there's an expert behind it and our job as design engineers is to collaborate with them and help them do their job and use their expertise to make the final decision that was a bit over time but hope that made sense a good framework i like to use is the good fast cheap triangle it states that when doing anything it's only possible to have two out of the three however at tesla it is our job every day to defy this role and achieve the impossible hope that helped what's up we're in malibu it's the first weekend of the month now we're not sleeping in a car i i was going to but julian convinced me not to i just copped the gopro literally like right before this trip and we're going to go test it out surfing and learning how to use it right now it's on the left like this one no it's this one on the left this is his house yeah this is how like he looks here well he looks like a charger there you see that yeah we're in malibu and this is adam sandler's julian house hi teaching julie hunty's surf right now getting him to practice when he just started surfing you want to stay close to the beach surf the white waters like this you know just get used to you being pushed by the way let's go you feel like you're a q a question yeah all right while we're sitting here waiting for some waves uh i'll take some time to answer some questions that you guys may have so how did i find my job at tesla i found it through linkedin actually i was just scrolling through linkedin one night and i saw a profile with my current mentor and his profile seemed really cool he's also from waterloo so i just sent him a connection request and he literally just responded offering an interview so shoot your shots you know what they say about shooting shots you miss 100 of the shots that's what they say about shooting shots so adding until i said back there there are tons of other people that get better advice than me on job searching but i just want to tell you that be confident and believe in yourself job searching is probably one of the most unrewarding process there is because your motivation is bound to go downhill until you find that right opportunity and if that's happening to you that's okay just know that it's part of the process and keep going play the numbers game but play it smart and one day you'll eventually hit that inflection point and see your film light up with that right notification so [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] music is also a really big part of my life sometimes i like to stay home and practice piano and guitar as well [Music] all right so regarding the recruitment process something that i used to believe in is that you need to have automotive experience or student design team in order for tesla to be interested in you and obviously those are very relevant to the role itself but after i got in i realized that what they're really looking for is examples of yourself solving hard engineering problems so in your resume and portfolio instead of rapid firing everything that you've done before in the past try to pick just two to four projects that you really took ownership on and outline the steps that you took to solve the problem as well as the results and quantifiable terms i think what helped me the most in lending a job is creating a presentation that i use to go through my experiences it's like a portfolio but a portfolio is meant to be glanced through and make a good first impression whereas your presentation is meant to be engaging and make yourself stick in the interviewer's head ninety percent of the time you'll be asked to you know give a summary of your experience or to walk through your resume and this is a time to ask hey do you mind if i share my screen real quick make sure to use analogies and illustrations to make your projects easy to understand i'm a pretty bad storyteller myself but i'm pretty sure it would be hard for anyone to try to describe this or this with just words for my interview we actually spend like an entire hour on just two projects that i did and they also ask technical questions that are related to the projects themselves so yeah i highly recommend everyone to do this because trust me linter viewers are tired of asking generic questions as much as you hate answering them and you also keep the questions close to your comfort zone at the same time so yeah that's a wrap thank you so much for watching hope you enjoyed the video as much as i enjoyed making it feel free to connect with me on linkedin or instagram and ask me any questions that you may have make sure to give the video a thumbs up and subscribe to the 16 weeks channel keep posted for a new video coming out next week on 16 weeks if you liked the video subscribe to my channel as well i think i'm going to post more stuff that i didn't get to in this video peace out

Channel: 16 Weeks

Views: 1,894

Keywords: san fran, San Francisco, work from home, internship, coop, education, technology, Summer internship, wfh, tech, student, vlog, daily vlog, day in the life, business, remote, remote work, university, remote internship, blog, design, start up, Tesla, Model X, Model S, Cybertruck, Elon, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, bitcoin, space x, electric cars, E-Cars, e-tech, renewable, cali

Id: hJb6fwhLYlE

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021