Hardware

Before your first internship, learn the lab instruments, take one project from schematic to bench test, and join a campus design team. Reviewers see the same kit builds over and over (opens in a new tab), so show depth instead. If entry-level design roles are scarce, take a technician or test role as a bridge. The career paths page names the titles and employers for power, analog, RF, and controls work.

Before your first internship

• Bench skills

  Practice on the lab scope until you can run the oscilloscope and the function generator without help.

• One build

  Take one project from schematic to bench test. List it with a measured number in each bracket.

• Design team

  Join a racing or rocket team in your first year. It gives you real work to talk about at a career fair.

If entry-level design roles are scarce

Test or technician role

Take one as a bridge. Before you accept, write down the design title you still want.

Three things to do before your first internship, and a bridge if design roles are scarce. Sources: a post on students who cannot use bench tools (opens in a new tab), a thread on design teams (opens in a new tab), and a post on starting as a technician (opens in a new tab).

Bench skills come first

A tool on a resume counts only next to work you did with it. Students get called out for not knowing how to use an oscilloscope or a function generator (opens in a new tab). Practice on the lab scope and function generator until you can run both without help, and say so at the fair.

Hardware builds that count

Aim the build at the hardware the company makes. Astranis is hiring a summer 2027 intern (opens in a new tab) to design, build, and lab-test the software-defined radio hardware in its satellites. The post asks for EE students who have designed and built a PCB from scratch. The role is on-site in San Francisco and pays $29 an hour.

Read what working engineers post about the parts they are moving to. One wrote that silicon carbide modules are taking inverter work from silicon (opens in a new tab) because they switch faster and run hotter with less cooling. If you build a power converter, that is the kind of part to read up on first.

Alex's page in the Alex's finished page section on the resume page gives the converter two lines. The entries on this page come from a fuller version of Alex's list, with more builds and roles than fit on that one page. The entry below is the long version a senior with more bench time could write. List yours the same way. A bracket such as [X] is a number you measure, and a bracket such as [University lab] is a name you fill in.

• Synchronous Buck Converter for a CubeSat Power Board, Fall 2025–Spring 2026, KiCad, LTspice, STM32, Embedded C, bench testing with an electronic load
  • Raised peak efficiency from [W]% to [X]% at [Y] A on an electronic load by replacing the catch diode with a synchronous MOSFET and tuning dead time to [Z] ns on an STM32 timer
  • Cut output ripple from [X] mV to [Y] mV peak to peak with a [Z]-layer KiCad layout that has a solid ground plane, a smaller switching loop, and an LC filter sized for [W] kHz
  • Kept the board alive through [Z] deliberate shorts at [W] V input with STM32 firmware in C that samples input current at [X] kHz and cuts the rail within [Y] µs of a fault
  • Held the FETs under [X] °C at full load with thermal vias and a [Y] oz copper pour under them

The battery monitor and the equalizer are two more builds written the same way.

• Bluetooth Battery Monitor, Fall 2024, ESP32, Arduino C++, Python, INA219 current sensor
  • Tracked [X] Li-ion cells within [Y] mV each on an ESP32 that streams to a Python dashboard
  • Extended pack runtime [X]% in field tests by adding a cutoff that drops non-critical loads at [Y] V
• FPGA [N]-Band Audio Equalizer, Spring 2025, Verilog, Vivado, MATLAB, Basys 3 FPGA, fixed-point DSP
  • Processed [X] kHz stereo audio at [Y] ms latency by pipelining [Z] [W]-tap FIR filters in Verilog
  • Matched the MATLAB response within [X] dB from [Y] Hz to [Z] kHz by testing coefficients in Vivado
  • Cut LUT use [X]% by time-sharing 1 multiplier per filter across all [Y] taps

Starting on a student budget

Cost stops students before they build, but most of it has a free route.

• Wokwi (opens in a new tab) simulates Arduino, ESP32, and STM32 boards in the browser for free.
• Department labs hold idle oscilloscopes, dev kits in a cupboard, and unused parts. Ask the lecturer or the lab technician before you buy.
• Five students can split the cost of one shared dev kit (opens in a new tab).

An EE and RF engineer with more than 35 years in the field, who also teaches in a university program, (opens in a new tab) teaches KiCad (opens in a new tab) to students and to the co-op students and interns at work. They have used Cadence, OrCad, Altium, Eagle, and other board tools.

Request an Altium student license (opens in a new tab) if you want practice in that tool before a job search, as one post on X recommends (opens in a new tab).

One EE student is skipping hardware builds because the parts cost too much (opens in a new tab). Hardware also has a higher opportunity cost than software (opens in a new tab). Opportunity cost is the other work you give up to do it.

Look up prices on the day you buy. Alex leaves the budget blank until the number is real. To borrow an idle scope, send a note like this:

I want to use an idle oscilloscope outside class.

I can come on [day] at [time].

I will leave the bench as I found it.

Teams and undergraduate research

Join a Formula SAE or other campus competition team (opens in a new tab). It gives you real work to talk about at a career fair.

Students debate whether to take an internship or a research position (opens in a new tab), and what undergraduate research is for, in that thread and in two more on internships with little experience (opens in a new tab) and undergraduate research (opens in a new tab). If you can take only one, choose the one where you will own a part you can explain. The entries below list both and do not rank them.

• Power Subsystem Engineer, [Student satellite team], Fall 2024–Spring 2026
  • Cut power board mass by [X] g by replacing [Y] linear regulators with 1 buck converter board that passed thermal vacuum testing from [Z] °C to [W] °C on the first try
  • Found [X] battery protection faults before launch review with a Python script that runs [Y] overnight charge cycles and flags any cell that drifts over [Z] mV from the pack average
• Undergraduate Research Assistant, [University lab], Summer 2025
  • Reduced GaN switching-loss error from [X]% to [Y]% by adding probe deskew to the double-pulse test
  • Cut test time per device from [X] to [Y] minutes with Python and PyVISA scope capture

Test or technician roles as a way in

Junior design titles are scarce. Search under other titles, and treat a test or technician role as a bridge. Before you accept one, write down the design title you still want.

One digest read 1,285 engineering roles in 24 hours (opens in a new tab). Of the 120 it read line by line, six carried a junior or intern tag. Five of the six came from one company, and the sixth was a social media job. The more open role that day was Test Engineer II at Blue Canyon Technologies (opens in a new tab) in Boulder. It was on-site work testing flight hardware, posted at $80,000 to $120,000, and asked for at most two years of experience.

Entry-level ads often ask for 2 to 3 years. One engineer who graduated in 2021 took 2 years to land a first electrical engineer role (opens in a new tab).

Paste these words into a search box:

• test
• validation
• manufacturing
• controls
• field applications engineer

One new graduate took a short technician stint at an aerospace company (opens in a new tab). Five months after graduation, they were still in final rounds for FPGA and analog roles, with no offer. An FPGA is a chip you set up by writing a configuration. Search the titles above and apply on the company site. When a final round goes quiet, write down the questions you missed.

Another person started as a lab engineer technician (opens in a new tab), moved to data center tech, and now does hardware and system validation while still in school.