Meet PAR’s 2020 Summer Interns
August 7, 2020
As we approach the final weeks of our summer internship program, PAR Systems would like to thank our 10 interns and highlight their contributions. PAR appreciates their hard work and wishes them the best of luck with their future endeavors.
Maria Wallace
My name is Maria Wallace and I’m a sales intern here at PAR working remotely, employed by the Shoreview office. I have worked on multiple projects this summer that included creating an account map, testing it with real customer accounts, Salesforce clean-up projects, and assisting the sales team with various tasks. I really enjoyed helping with the behind the scenes set up for the sales meeting and watching everything come together. My favorite tasks have been sitting in on customer calls and assisting the sales team with research. I like sitting in on customer calls because I’m able to learn different sales techniques. I’ve had an amazing summer here at PAR and I can’t believe how nice everyone has been and how willing they all were to help me when I needed it. The sales team treated me like one of their own and included me in many of their everyday sales activities. I’m very grateful for this experience as it has helped me to develop as a professional in the workforce.
Jordan Cullen
My name is Jordan Cullen and I am a controls engineer intern in Shoreview, Minnesota. The projects I have worked on are an automated crane study, a palletizing system, and a motorized telemanipulator. My experience working at PAR as an intern has been overwhelmingly positive. The ability to work on actual projects out on the floor was not something I anticipated happening when I started at PAR. I am grateful for this opportunity and I feel that it has benefited my professional life in immeasurable ways. Additionally, the internship has given me the opportunity to gain a better understanding of how to communicate professionally in the workplace, especially with cross-functional partners who may have a much different skill set than I do. My time at PAR has been unforgettable and I have enjoyed every minute of it!
Emily Goldberg
My name is Emily Goldberg, and I’m a mechanical engineering intern at Shoreview. I’ve done both mechanical work and software development for a laser scribe machine. The software work has been my favorite part of the summer, as it gave me a chance to take an existing application (generating compensation files for traditional PAR robots) and generalize it so that it will be usable with any new robot configuration. I’ve never before had a chance to work on a project so exclusively, and it’s been very rewarding to be able to put in enough time and effort to make something professional and useful – and the fact that it’s useful for interesting robots is certainly a bonus!
Jared Vale
My name is Jared Vale, and I am a Mechanical Design Intern for PAR Marine in Brunswick, GA. I have worked on a total of 4 projects this summer including developing a Contactless Rudder Angle Indicator, designing a testing rig, create engineering equations on excel for specific design equations, and comparing revisions of engineering drawings. The experience in all of these projects gave me incredibly valuable information that I can use for the future. Initially, I was worried about how that would even be possible because of working remotely during COVID 19. However, the projects I worked on and the people I got to communicate with shaped my overall experience positively. My favorite project was when I had to perform shock test calculations to verify new HPU components. I previously did not fully understand how I would be able to perform the analysis since I had not learned some of the necessary calculations in school. This project ultimately pushed my limits.
Zach Drayna
My name is Zach Drayna and I am a mechanical engineering intern that would have been working at building 625 in Shoreview. I have worked on a waterjet proposal, an Aircraft Drill Study, a Friction Stir Welding conversion, and a Turntable upgrade. Being a PAR employee has given me the opportunity to learn from some of the brightest engineers I have ever worked with. From clean sheet design work to renovating previous projects, this internship has taught me to think more critically and strive to find the best possible design solution for every problem. This internship has also shown me the various roles that mechanical engineers are often asked to fill within a company.
Jackson Wilken
My name is Jackson Wilken, and I’m a Mechanical Engineering Intern working at PAR Systems’ Shoreview headquarters. I’ve been involved with many interesting projects since I started here back in May, and I’ve gained valuable experience in the automation, aerospace, and nuclear industries as a result. Working at PAR has greatly improved my engineering design and technical documentation skills, and this culminated in my contributions to a robotic de-casing R&D system we currently have in development. During my time on the project, I worked heavily on mechanical design and CAD drafting while helping to improve multiple subsystems, and I gained extensive experience with component sourcing by interacting directly with vendors. Overall, my summer at PAR has been an awesome experience; I’ve learned a ton here and met some great people, and It’s a community that I’d love to come back to after I graduate.
Jake Rascher
My name is Jake Rascher and I worked as a Finance Intern for PAR this past summer. I primarily worked with the Shoreview office but also helped the Oak River and Brunswick offices when they needed assistance. My time at PAR was amazing to say the least. Everyone in the organization, from the top down, was extremely caring and helpful with the transition to a remote working environment. They were very inclusive and made the internship feel as if I was physically present in the office. Throughout the summer, I worked on many financial projects but spent the most time on revenue forecasts for the remainder of the year. This was my favorite project because it presented many challenges that I had to overcome related to new Covid-19 restrictions and regulations that affected the production of some projects. I am very grateful the applicable learning experience I had during my time at PAR.
Abigail Klein
My name is Abby Klein and I am a Controls Engineer Intern in the Aerospace division at the Shoreview, MN location. I have worked on a few different projects throughout my internship. All of these projects have allowed me to get involved with schematics, Input/Output Checkout, PLC programming, machine vision, and more. I have had an amazing experience as a PAR employee. Everyone that I have worked with has been more than willing to answer my questions, get me to the right person, or teach me something new. Even throughout working from home, communication kept strong by phone and skype calls. Thank goodness for screen share! My favorite project that I worked on is between updating and adding to the schematics for a specific project as well as picking out cables and adding them to our parts server. However, I also really enjoyed working with vision for IR Drill and getting to experience a system that I had never directly used before.
Benjamin Scherer
My name is Benjamin Scherer and I am the Marketing Intern at PAR’s Shoreview location. Over the course of the summer, I have worked on various projects at PAR. Some of these include conducting competitive research over 100 of PAR’s identified competitors by industry, technology, and product, and organizing and setting up PAR’s email campaign efforts. Along with this, I have been conducting competitive analysis via social media platforms and helping PAR in their efforts to become a larger presence online. My favorite project I worked on this summer was performing competitive research because it helped me gain familiarity in the Industrial Automation industry. As a whole, I had an incredible summer working with PAR and the marketing team and believe the experience I had is integral to my professional development. Everyone I had the chance to meet was welcoming and the work I completed was challenging but also enjoyable.
