Over the past 12 months, Labman has had the pleasure of working with Wiremu as another Year-in-Industry intern. Wirmeu joined Labman from Leeds University and has played a key part in the company during his 12 months of being an intern. We will certainly miss him!
I think from the start, I’ve felt like I hit the jackpot by working here. Places like Labman are few and far between and as soon as I heard about the sort of work done here, I was keen to join.
One of the best things about working at Labman is the variety of work here. The lack of limits on who can do what. It’s refreshing to be able to jump from CAD to supplier work to fabrication so easily. Rather than be stuck in the same role for an entire year. Being involved in a project from multiple angles can give you real foresight when solving problems.
Within my first few months, I found myself working on the testing stages of a soon-to-be-world-first robot working with liquid nitrogen. Which is about as fancy as it sounds. I’m not sure what the best way to spend a pandemic is. But I reckon to make robots and testing with liquid nitrogen all day surely has to be up there. Thanks to the way Labman handled COVID-19 in the workplace, and the nature of the project work I had to do, other than two weeks in self-isolation I was able to spend all my time working in person. Especially in the early days of my placement this really helped me get to grips with how the company operated.
I think keeping the practical side of engineering so involved with the regular design stages is something that Labman values a lot and works very well. The more time I was able to spend in the workshop, the better my designs became, because I began to get to grips with the limits of what you could manufacture with ease.
Labman is a place filled with people working on their own projects, and even more people happy to help you with them. As I began to work on my own ridiculous project. A 3kW sound system for my house. Everyone I told at Labman was happy to remind me how excessive it was. But that they still wanted to see it happen, and that really gave me the confidence to go ahead with it.
Next up, I’ve got two more years at University in Leeds before I’m back in the working world again. For now, however, I’ve still got some pretty big speakers that need assembling over this summer, and some pictures to take of it to send back to the guys at Labman. (Shoutout to Mikey P for spending all that time on the router cutting them out).