Creating Engineers: Ciholas Summer Internship Program

The Ciholas summer internship program gives bright students the chance to do real engineering.

Every summer, Ciholas offers a handful of students the opportunity to intern with our company. At Ciholas, we treat our interns like any other engineer or scientist, giving them company projects to complete or problems to solve that fall within their area of study. Over the summer, our interns grow in their chosen field while their work moves our intellectual property (and in some cases our clients’ IP) forward.

“I learned a lot,” said Conner Luebbehusen, a sophomore at the University of Evansville and a Ciholas intern. “I spent the first two weeks just reading code and trying to understand what it did. Now, I’m writing the code. That’s cool.”

Our company is growing. In the past 20 years, we have  focused primarily on creating intellectual property for our clients. Over the past five years, we have begun to focus more and more on Ciholas-owned intellectual property like our new Ciholas Ultra-Wideband (CUWB) system. CUWB can track the real-time location of an item with extreme precision.

Our system uses Ultra Wide Band radio transmissions to generate a location in real-time. Ultra-wideband, as an Real-Time Location System (RTLS), is far more accurate than existing phase based solutions. For example, bluetooth and WiFi technologies can achieve an accuracy of about plus or minus one meter.

“Plus or minus a meter is huge,” said Director of Engineering Justin Bennett. “Let’s say you want to track a pallet in a warehouse, and you want to know it is on the third shelf, second rack. Those systems just aren’t precise enough to help you do something like that. We are precise enough.”

The launch of the CUWB system created more work allowing us to expand our internship program. Some of our interns this summer worked on projects to improve system accuracy while others were tasked with building additional features to the system.

“This summer I helped out with the design, testing and release of a new ultra-wide band device that is designed specifically for personnel tracking,” said Evan Thomas, a Ciholas intern and junior at Purdue University. “I was able to learn quite a bit about the entire process from design to having it manufactured, followed up by testing and making revisions. It’s the type of thing you can’t really get out of a traditional classroom.”