<p>well, actually i'm one of the interns and they made me do nothing for one week straight. </p>
<p>everyone's pretty busy. </p>
<p>well, i'm not too inclined in getting job in this company, so i can relax....</p>
<p>but i was wondering if it is actually expected for us interns to ask for something to do if they make me do nothing</p>
<p>I do LOTS of autocad work and a little bit of field work... like checking to make sure what's recorded is actually out there. Then I run documents around to different offices and sometimes help with design work.</p>
<p>I'm almost always busy at the company I intern for and essentially do exactly what the full time employees do. I take a load off of everyones shoulder by completing the work that must be done, but they may not have time for. </p>
<p>I work a lot with AutoCAD doing red lines and creating details. I also edit construction constructs, fill RFIs, and sometimes make deliveries to the trailers at the construction site. Every now and then I get to go out to the field to see what's actually going on and get a better idea of the plans I look at all day in the office.</p>
<p>I wrote computer programs. One of them used statistics to discover where a sound source was in the room (the code was already written in MATLAB so I just had to translate it to C). The other controlled an analogue switch unit. I am an electrical engineer.</p>
<p>Some interns tend to get suck doing a lot of tedious work because the regular engineers don't have time to do it. I work at a power plant and there is too much work for our staff so when an inexperienced interns comes along they may be given tedious work that doesn't require much experience, but is required nonetheless. For example, one of the interns has to go around and verify A LOT of electrical drawings because it is a safety inititiave. Long and boring work but the regular engineers have too many other pressing issues to focus on. When I was an intern my work was devided between this type of tedious work and as I got more experienced I was given projects to work on. I don't work for any of the companies that I interned with because the industries (steel and chemical) didn't have the work that I like. I am currently a power plant engineer....more exciting than steel and chemical plants to me.</p>
<p>I'm interning at Fermilab and I'm writing software scripts to monitor the computing grids. It is the same idea in my case too, the regular employees (almost all have PhD's) are too expensive to do the more simplistic tedious things so they bring in a summer student to do it.</p>
<p>nasa is cool. i help designing stuff used for tests. i don't design any of the satellite stuff of course, but i get to design the stuff that they use to help test the satellite sensors =)</p>
<p>which nasa center do you intern at?</p>
<p>where im at, i dont do much either. i feel bad asking for stuff to do though, because my supervisor is always so busy with his work. ive been trying to beef up on programming the last couple of weeks, but its so boring.</p>
<p>Interns tend to do a lot of QAQC work at pretty much everywhere I worked at. Also lots of autocad. As others have said, the workload is typically stuff that is required, but tedious. </p>
<p>Definitely ask for work if you don't have anything to do. If your boss is busy, all that means is you can take a load off his or her shoulders. They won't know you don't have any work to do unless you ask. Of course you'll start off with boring work, but sometimes, if you do well on the stuff they give you, they'll give you more responsibilities slowly.</p>
<p>make coffee</p>
<p>Intern on an oil platform. Pretty fun, just working with the maintenance guys. Really hands on, but not super technical (although moderately). Right now I'm just helping guys rebuild/replace pumps, and stuff like that.</p>