The following is feedback from a student who completed a week of work experience at the electrical engineering department. Special thanks to all the staff involved for their support.

My internship at the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences

My name is Florian Donath. I'm in the 11th grade at Christian-Weise-Gymnasium and will probably graduate from high school in 2016. That's why I'm interested in what paths I can take after school. As I am interested in technology, I have looked around for relevant fields of study and have finally arrived at electrical engineering, mechatronics or mechanical engineering. In order to find out whether, and if so, which direction would suit me, I decided to do an internship at the university.

During this internship week, I went through different stations.

The first was the robot "Robotino", to which I was given certain instructions (Fig. 1).

It is able to move in any direction as it has an omni-drive. It took me about 3 days to "teach" it to move to the desired point when coordinates were entered. Optionally, it was also possible to operate it using a control element. The special feature of the whole thing was that, based on my instructions, it always tried to keep a minimum distance from objects in its vicinity. This ultimately resulted in the somewhat more complex circuit diagram (Fig. 2).

On another day, I visited the training workshop in House VII, where I was able to learn how to solder simple components. My success became apparent when I managed to get a simple flashing circuit to work on a circuit board.

On the penultimate day, I was able to gain an insight into PLC programming. My task was to develop a traffic light circuit, which was also successful.

I also got to know various laboratories and gained an overview of the fields of activity.

In conclusion, I can say that this internship and the conversation with Mr. Paetzold helped me to consolidate my desire to study, so that I will probably end up in mechatronics.