Traveling has always been a goal in my life. I say travel not in a sense of just visiting new places but the feeling of a country, the way people live their everyday life, their celebrations, their government, their god and in shorts the feature that distinguished a culture from another. This type of travel is only possible if a person has the chance to live among the people and interact with them on a daily basis which made me so honored to be given this opportunity by IAESTE committee of Iran.
I was given the chance to work on a funded project at the Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences in Coimbatore, India for a period of two months. I stayed in India from July 10th 2018 to September 18th 2018. Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences has one of the three active IAESTE LCs in India.
I worked on a project with the title of “Design & Simulation of a Serpentine Micro-Heater Using ANSYS software”, which is an effective element in biological micro devices such as PCRs. Aside from this project, I started working with a team of people in Nanotechnology Lab which gave me the opportunity to use different equipment for execution of procedures like Physical Vapor Deposition and Laser Beam deposition. My supervisor Dr. K. Vinoth Kumar Assistant Professor/EEE, was an understanding person who gave me the freedom to choose my preferable title for my project but since the field of the project was unrelated to his expertise, I wasn’t able to use his help on the matter and with his suggestion I started my work in the Nanotechnology Lab. Beside my project I participated in some workshops and worked on some side projects with other master students at the faculty.
The other side of this internship was the cultural side. I met a lot of people from various countries and cultures and the process of getting to know these people from completely different backgrounds and becoming good friends was one the most interesting experiences throughout this internship. Aside from living and working together, we spend all of our spare time doing group activities or just hanging out. We traveled through south India in the weekends and on the highlights was walking in small cities in a 25 people group of foreigners. I even got the chance to travel to the north after finishing my internship with some of my new friends. All this time spend together makes all the difference in knowing who a person really is and from the point of complete strangers we become friends and even confidants. I am beyond glad to be able to say that now I have great friends from different part of the world and different cultures but with the same spirit and heart.
In the end I like to thank the IAESTE committee for providing this opportunity.
Written By: Shaghayegh Mesforush
Amir Kabir (Tehran Polytechnic) University