End of an era

With my internship in Munich coming to an end, I am overwhelmingly excited to go home for the first time after a 2-year stint overseas. Even though there are things I won’t miss, such as the long trips on the metro to and from the office and the roof caving in on top of us daily at work, there is some disappointment leaving all the people I’ve met during these 6 months in Munich.

Integrating with everyone in the department was easy from the beginning. I was very fortunate to come into a very warm and welcoming international group with a strong intern culture. Thanks to the multiple games of kicker every day and occasional meetups for drinks during the week, it didn’t take long to feel like part of the team.

During the second half of my internship, the pace of work definitely took a big step up. Although I was working on the same Vision project, there were all of a sudden many presentations to prepare for to showcase our work and even more long evenings and mornings to prepare for them. For all of our work we used Nvidia Omniverse to compile our assets and scenes to create renders and VR environments for all of these presentations. It’s not the most friendly tool to use, but it’s also relatively new and has a lot of potential to enhance the 3D workflow.

The majority of my time while I’ve been in Europe has been spent in Austria and Portugal. During the last 6 months in Munich, I made fairly frequent return trips to these places, including to the Vorarlberg and Salzburg regions in Austria, as well as to Lisbon. I also made trips to Cologne and Hamburg since these were 2 cities that I hadn’t seen yet. I spent my holidays doing 2-week road trip around the entirety of Portugal. For the last few days of the holiday I had left, I spent them in the Algarve in the south of Portugal, relaxing on the beach before my flight back home.

My advice for future interns I think would be, like anything, to come into the internship without expectations. Look to learn what you do and don’t like about the work and use it as an indicator for future positions. Make sure to take time to learn and work on what you want to work on, and look for any opportunities to integrate those into the projects you’re given. It’s only 6 months at one of the biggest companies in the world, so make the most of it and leave a good impression. It will look great on the CV and the connections might come in handy in the future.

Ryan Chappell
BMW Logistics Innovation + Robotics Design Intern 2024