Last summer I interned with Northrop Grumman which, according to Wikipedia, is the “world’s fifth-largest arms trader”. Apparently arms trading is such a lucrative industry that despite being only the fifth largest, Northrop Grumman has so much cash rolling in that they are able to hire high school interns with no experience and pay them exorbitant sums of money. Thank God taxpayers wholeheartedly support the United States military’s need to possess stealth bombers that cost over $2 billion a piece, otherwise defense contractors might be forced to pay their interns only slightly above minimum wage.
I interned with the company’s Technical Sector, which basically dealt with maintaining and modernizing the internal networks on aircraft. Northrop’s internship program is fairly new, so they were still working out a lot of the kinks. That meant there wasn’t really a planned set of tasks for me to accomplish and a lot of my time was spent learning how to use Solidworks, a 3D modeling software. This largely consisted of me sitting alone in my cubicle messing around with the various tools and shapes while listening to podcasts for 8 hours until I went home. I found out much later that one license of Solidworks costs almost $4000. And to think I was only using it to create bootleg models of Pacman.
The B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber, the aircraft Northrop is probably most famous for
Despite how I may be depicting my experience, overall I’m really glad I was able to participate in the internship. My manager was really nice and helpful, always looking for various odd jobs for me to do so I could feel slightly less useless. The team of engineers were much the same, and I greatly enjoyed eavesdropping on their conversations about Game of Thrones and Mario Odyssey, but feeling too intimidated to contribute anything. Sitting in on meetings, learning how teams tackle large scale projects, and looking at Excel spreadsheets for countless hours were interesting insights into the office environment.
There were a few other interns working in the same office, albeit all college interns, who I also got to know pretty well. The company hosted a “Summer Intern Challenge” in which teams were asked to create a website for managers to post task listings for existing interns. While our team was initially disappointed in getting 2nd place, losing to a team in Maryland, we were much happier after learning the winning team’s only prize was bragging rights, which we all know amounts to nothing.
While it may sound like I was more or less paid to be babysat by some engineers all day, the internship came with its fair share of challenges, the most prominent of which I encountered outside the office. Every time I got off the highway on my way home, there would be a homeless man standing on the corner of the street with a cardboard sign saying “Anything Helps God Bless”. Here’s a guy who could easily do my job and needs the money much more desperately too. The very least I could do is offer him a piece of what I earned in a corrupt system that only exists to benefit the already fortunate. That thought plagued my mind right up until the moment the light turned red and I found myself instinctively locking the car doors and looking forward to avoid eye contact with the man just a foot beyond the driver side window. This problem was easily circumvented after the second week of my internship when I decided to just take the next exit and avoid the homeless man altogether.
And that’s what I did with my summer.