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PEY - Co-op

Engineering involves more than what you learn in a classroom or lab. It's about creating things, solving problems and working in teams. To help you get that experience, Engineering at U of T has a co-op program called the Professional Experience Year. Interested students go out to work for 12 to 16 months, normally after third year. These are real engineering jobs where you have the opportunity to put into practise all the things you learned in the classroom (and earn a good salary). Below, Anahita and Andrew share their current PEY experiences:

Anahita

Name: Anahita Panthaky
PEY Placement: DB2 UDB System Verification Test (SVT), IBM Software Lab, Markham

Daily Grind: As part of SVT, I test the robustness and stability of the code for new versions of DB2. This involves debugging a lot of code I haven't written and have probably not seen before - DB2 has a lot of code! Usually, finding a problem is followed by a good dose of digging around to find the root cause, reporting it and testing resulting patches. On occasion, these defects get turned into educational presentations on how to debug certain issues. I also have the opportunity to mentor one of the new team members, in Ireland! We spend a few hours a day working through any problems and issues that may have arisen.

Comments: One of the first things IBM showed me was just how connected we all are.
I may be working in Toronto, but parts of my team are in Ottawa and Ireland, and I work with people in Oregon, Silicon Valley and China. I have witnessed and worked with globalization at it's best. I have met so many people, both virtually and in person, that my network of people has expanded faster than I could imagine.

Name: Andrew Rosselet
PEY placement: Research In Motion, Waterloo

Daily grind: Building and maintaining the Blackberry Handheld applications, right now I'm working on Calendar, earlier in my term I did Email and SMS. I'm usually fixing defects on the device software, but I've have done some feature work and some unit testing. I also spent a summer on the OS team working on the GPS firmware. On the side, I'm trying to get ahead on my fourth year design project.

Comments: Demanding and challenging, but very interesting. A year to appreciate what working as an engineer is all about. What it means to take responsibility for your own design and fully understand the impact of your contribution to a larger project.