After a rigorous academic year of classes, projects and presentations, students apply their newfound knowledge and hone their skills at summer internships. Reagan Burkemper, junior computer engineering student, and Evan Schubert, senior computer science student, spent the summer applying their artificial intelligence (AI) skillsets at their internships at Husco, a company specializing in hydraulic and electro-mechanical control systems for the automotive and off-highway equipment industries.

Husco prides itself on offering an internship program that gives students the opportunity to work on real projects and collaborate with their colleagues. “Husco’s internship and co-op program is designed to give students real-world exposure to engineering, manufacturing and business functions in an actual workplace setting,” said Allison Salkeld, marketing manager at Husco. “From day one, the interns and co-ops are given meaningful projects that directly impact the company’s success. Interns are full contributors—they participate in meetings, interact with customers and apply their classroom knowledge to solve problems.”

Over the course of the 12-week internship program at Husco, Burkemper and Schubert tackled projects that utilized AI to streamline processes. Schubert was tasked with creating a chatbot that generates recommended solutions for technicians. Previously, technicians and operators needed to manually go through logs to determine how to fix issues. Now, they can get their answer in seconds with the chatbot.

“Technicians can go into this chatbot and say ‘hey, I’m at this production line, and I’m having problems with this object,’ and then enter a short description of the exact problem the production line is having,” explained Schubert. The chatbot then searches the database to find the most relevant maintenance logs that have already been solved and generate its recommendation to fix the issue at hand. “It’s going to help save a lot of time without having to manually go through that database.”

In the same realm, Burkemper’s project also provides a time-saving solution with the help of AI. Each month, her colleague receives an excel file spanning nearly 3,000 rows and 56 columns detailing warranty claims. Burkemper worked on training an AI model that sifts through all the data and predicts the failure code and settlement amount while cleaning up the data to make it easier for her colleague to work with. 

Burkemper was grateful for her data classes and AI Tools class that prepared her with the skillsets needed for her internship. “The processes I did for my Intro to Data Science final project helped me with this current project at Husco,” said Burkemper. “I took my first data science classes my sophomore year where we built three different models, which I think really strengthened my resume and helped me in my internship role.”

Learning at the forefront of applied AI education at MSOE empowered Burkemper and Schubert to have the knowledge and skillsets to apply AI to their internships and contribute to real projects. “It’s really cool getting to see HUSCO being open to utilizing a lot of different AI resources and kind of see what works and we apply it to all these business use cases,” said Schubert.

By applying their AI skillsets to their projects, Husco interns are able to bring new ideas to the table and solve challenging problems. 

“Interns bring a fresh perspective and a willingness to learn,” said Salkeld. “They make meaningful contributions, drive innovation and often bring new ideas that help us challenge the status quo.”  

This fall, Burkemper and Schubert returned to MSOE, ready to continue to grow and expand their AI knowledge. They were grateful for their internship experience and look forward to applying the soft and technical skills they gained at Husco to their coursework at MSOE.

“I really liked my Husco internship,” said Burkemper. “It was a lot of freedom, and I really liked that I got to figure out projects myself.”

Schubert agreed. “It was a really good experience. They gave us the tools we needed and the business problem they wanted us to solve. People were very friendly and super easy to collaborate with.”

Students interested in landing their own internship should visit the Career Connections Center in CC-370 or online at msoecareerconnections.com for assistance and resources.