Category: Joshua

            Overall, I think I did very well in this internship. I was able to accomplish all of the tasks given to me, though some were more difficult than others. My biggest strength was being able to figure things out on my own, specifically how to use the required simulation software and read diagrams submitted by clients. All power supply diagrams I received were written in mostly in Vietnamese, with minimal English. After studying them for some time, I was able to determine what each symbol and the information accompanying them meant. I was also able to form good relationships with my coworkers, which I had thought would be difficult for me. The most important thing I think I need to work on is asking for help when I need it. Many times I was stuck on a project and spent much longer than necessary trying to fix the problem on my own out of fear of disappointing my superiors. This fear is unrealistic as they understand that I am here as a student and the purpose of the internship is to learn and gain experience. When I eventually decided to ask for help, my supervisor was happy to explain things to me in every circumstance. In the future, it will save me a lot of time and trouble to just directly ask for clarification.

            In terms of my career, this internship actually helped me realize what I don’t want to do with my future. Although the work I did here was interesting and meaningful, I realized that I do not want to work with high power equipment and power distribution. I gained some excellent skills and knowledge, which have made me a more versatile and experienced engineer, but I have found that I like the nuances of working with low power circuits and designing devices, rather than designing systems with finished products. Despite the fact that I didn’t particularly love the high-power equipment, this internship helped me narrow my focus and point me in a direction that will hopefully lead to a successful career.

            Living and working in Ho Chi Minh has changed my view on life in a few ways, most notably to appreciate what I have. I had previously thought I appreciated how wonderful it is to live in a developed country, I didn’t understand the real extent of the difference until I came to Vietnam. And Vietnam isn’t even close to the least developed country in the world, there are many places that have far worse conditions than here, and it has been a very eye-opening experience in that regard.  The other thing I have taken from this experience is to be confident in myself and my abilities. I reinvented myself a bit at work, and tried to be more outgoing than I typically am. I think it helped to make a good impression on my coworkers and made them more interested in getting to know me. This is something I’d like to continue in the States and for the rest of my life.

The best moment of my internship so far was after I finished a simulation assignment I was given a couple weeks ago. I was tasked with simulating the power supply system for a client, specifically a paper producing plant, which included multiple power sources and over forty industrial motors. I was able to successfully simulate the plant given a diagram that had very little English, and noticed that the transformer that the company had selected to step the 22,000 volt line voltage down to the 500 volts that the motors used was not rated for enough current. I sent the simulation and my assessment of the power transformer to my supervisor, and he sent it directly to the client with my recommendation to increase the rating of the transformer without making any corrections. I was very proud to have simulated such a complicate system and noticed an error that a professional consultant had made.

I think my best professional accomplishment has been forming good relationships with my coworkers and supervisors. Before I started my internship I was very concerned with my ability to befriend the people that I would be working with, but I have been able to make good connections with my fellow ABB employees. I was even invited to have dinner with my supervisor and his wife. I feel much more confident in my abilities to work with others and meet new people in a workplace setting.

After living and working in Ho Chi Minh city for a bit over 6 weeks now, I have seen how truly luxurious my life is in the United States. I had always know that I was very fortunate to live where I do, but it has been very impactful to see the difference with my own eyes. Even in Vietnam my life has been luxurious, my apartment here is nicer than my apartment back in Gainesville. Seeing how many people here live has made me take a step back and appreciate what I have back home on a deeper level that I have in the past.

            In my time at ABB, I have learned a significant amount about a part of the electrical industry that has not been my focus during my education at UF. My department in ABB deals with the extremely heavy-duty equipment involved in power grids and power distribution. The products that ABB produces have power ranges that can be many hundreds, and even thousands, of times bigger than the equipment that I have used in class. The considerations for such high-power systems are much different than the considerations that must be made for lower power applications.

            ABB has two important strengths in my opinion: quality and innovation. ABB products are widely regarded as premium products, and they are well trusted. Several customers stated that ABB products are reliable and high quality in meetings I attended. ABB is also producing solutions that make designing power systems much simpler. The most notable case I have encountered is an automatic transfer switch that includes many other components that are typically external to make installation take only a few minutes and require only a single cable. Typical transfer switches require hundreds of feet of cable and around 20 external connections. As far as I am aware, no other company has produced such an effective and convenient solution for switching between power sources.  

            The biggest weakness in Vietnam for ABB is its delivery times. I visited several distributors and customers a couple weeks ago, and every single one we visited said that ABB products take too long to arrive in Vietnam – sometimes even double the time of other brands’ deliveries. Many claimed they would use ABB products if their delivery times could match the competition’s times.

            As a result of the long delivery times and customers’ view of ABB, a huge opportunity for ABB is to have products ready to ship in a regional distribution center to reduce delivery times. Based on customer feedback, ABB products would sell much better in Vietnam if the lead times were reduced as there is a good market for what ABB has to offer.

ABB’s most prominent threat is its competition’s prices. Since ABB products are premium they are expensive to make, and the customers are left to absorb the elevated cost. Several distributor visits revealed that prices were extremely important, and ABB products are often passed up in favor of cheaper products. ABB has several competitors in Vietnam who produce much cheaper products, and this is a huge problem for ABB.

            One memorable moment for me in Saigon was actually in a grab. The driver wanted to practice his English and he was very happy talking with me. It was about a forty-minute ride, so I was able to talk to him for a while. At the end of the ride, he asked if I had any coins from the U.S. so that he could remember the day. I only had one coin, a penny I had found heads up on the ground several months ago that I had kept in my wallet. It seemed like the perfect time to pass it on to somebody else. He was very happy when I gave it to him.

            The biggest challenge with my internship is the language barrier. Often a supervisor comes to me to give me a task, but I cannot understand what is being asked of me. When I try to ask for clarification, the supervisor cannot understand what I am asking. Even if he understands that I want clarification, it is difficult for him to express himself in English any better than he had the first time. This results in days where I have a bit of a stalemate with my supervisors and it can be difficult to get things done. While this is quite a challenge for me, it does provide an opportunity to improve my communication skills. It forces me to clearly state what I mean and encourages me to choose my words carefully. This is something that I typically try to do anyway, but the language barrier is further improving my abilities.

            The best part of my work with ABB is the wide variety of tasks that I have been able to take part in. I started out running simulations of client designs, moved on to designing a demo box for ABB’s solar products, then to learning some more of ABB’s software and even doing distributor and factory visits. At the end of this week, I am supposed to do some work with some physical equipment which is very exciting. I’ve received many opportunities that I would never have gotten with an internship at home. Many factories are located in Asia, and it seems that Vietnam will have more and more manufacturers moving in over the next several years. This internship provided some unbelievable opportunities to see where many of the things we take for granted in the U.S. are actually manufactured.
            At the end of last week on a factory visit with my supervisor and two ABB Italy representatives, we stopped at a Pho restaurant for lunch. My supervisor ordered for the table and got Pho with cow tendon and tripe which I did not particularly care for. But with the Pho, they brought this fried orange cake ball which was absolutely delicious. It was a ball of dough with some orange in the middle, and it had some vanilla and sesame seeds. The ball itself was hollow and very thin, and the piece of orange in the middle was free to move around inside it. It was easily the best thing that I have tried to date in Ho Chi Minh, and I’ve been looking for a place that sells them though I’ve been unsuccessful.

My projects with ABB so far have been relatively short, each task typically requires only one or two days of work. This week, I have been doing distributor visits with another member of the company named Hai who has been my mentor. Two ABB members from Italy also have been joining us on these trips. We have been interviewing distributors and panel builders to see how ABB electrification products are being used in Vietnam, and how they can be improved. These trips have taken me all over Ho Chi Minh, to many places I would never have been able to visit if Hai had not asked me to take part in the meetings. In the last 4 weeks, I hope to get some more simulation projects for clients, while working on these I feel that I am making a real impact on the company as I am directly checking clients’ work and providing feedback for them.

            My supervisor Huu is very quiet and reserved, though he is good at delegating. I don’t speak with him directly very often, and generally get my work from Hai. Hai and I have developed a good friendship, and he is as eager to teach as I am to learn. My most obvious strength compared with my coworkers is my English, they come talk to me to practice their English, and I have helped my coworkers to find the right words to express themselves in meetings. All of my coworkers are very intelligent, as well as kind and welcoming, so our relationships are generally all very good.

            The most significant thing I have absorbed from living in Ho Chi Minh is to just go with the flow and not be upset by uncertainty. I already tried to live my life this way before coming here, but Vietnam has taken it to a new level. Many opportunities have presented themselves quickly, and it has been fun to take as many of them as I can. Many things are uncertain and unpredictable here, especially transportation, and this has made me more accepting of the fact that I can’t always control what happens to me.

            There are a couple of people that oversee me here at ABB, my actual supervisor is named Hien, but I see very little of him. He is the head of the electrification department and he is usually very busy. I mostly deal with two people named Huu and Hai who are both consultants within the electrification department. They are both very quiet and soft-spoken, but Hai talks to me quite a bit more than Huu does. Huu has given me one project to work on which I was able to complete relatively quickly, but Hai has given me several more difficult and technical things to work on.

            My internship has been relatively unstructured, I have been given minimal training and the assumption of my coworkers has been that I already know how to do the things that they are asking of me. The only real training I have received is through product manuals that are available in a storage room. I am given miscellaneous tasks, though the majority of my time has been spent simulating microgrid designs that clients have submitted in order to check their work. Often my simulations of their designs reveal issues, which I then bring to Hai. He then explains to me the reason for the flaw, and we discuss how it can be solved. The simulation and recommendations are then sent to the client. I have also been working with some actual equipment, mostly some very large and heavy-duty circuit breakers. Hai had me work with the internet capabilities of some of them to learn how they work.

            The most memorable personal experience in Ho Chi Minh for me so far was getting some food with the tour guide soccer team after the match we played with them. They took us to what appeared to be a very local restaurant, and we had duck eggs. The interesting part was that the duck eggs actually had baby ducks growing in them, so it was a mixture of regular egg and bits of baby duck. There were some interesting textures in there, I don’t think I will ever forget that. I definitely will not have another one though. 

The company I am working for is called ABB, a multinational company that typically deals with robotics, automation, power, and heavy electrical equipment. I am working in the electrification department, which works with power supply systems for clients.

            The first week of work was interesting, Monday and Tuesday I was given several large product manuals to read, in order to become familiar with the products that ABB offers. Most of the reading material was on heavy duty circuit breakers and the different types that ABB offers. Wednesday and Thursday, I was given a power supply design submitted by a client and was tasked with simulating it to confirm that the design would work. It took a while to understand the simulation software, I wasn’t given any instruction and the software is fairly complicated. It also took a while to figure out the diagram submitted by the client, I wasn’t familiar some of the symbols, and much of the labeling was done in Chinese and Vietnamese. I was able to figure it out eventually, and through simulation found some errors in the client’s design and found solutions for them. Friday, I selected components for a demo box that would be used to showcase ABB’s solar equipment for clients. This task took less time, most of it was spent researching parts.

            The work environment is very relaxed, many people come in late and eat their breakfast in the break room. Lunch is very long; it usually ends up being about an hour and a half. Many people end up leaving early as well, and there is always some chatter going on in the office. There are about fifteen or twenty people in my department, and there are multiple departments on the same floor. I have a desk and a computer, as well as some dividers to form small cubicles. The office actually has two floors, the lower floor has all of the offices and work areas, and the upper floor has some robotics and electrical equipment. This is exceptionally interesting, as I can go upstairs and see the actual equipment that I have been researching and reading about.

             In my opinion, the most culturally informative activity we participated in was the excursion to Black Lady Mountain. It was the least tourist-focused area we visited, and it appeared that most of the people there were locals. The mountain was quiet and much of the surrounding rural area was visible from the top. I felt that this activity was the most unbiased introduction to Vietnam and its people relative to the other activities we did.

            Vietnam has absolutely exceeded my expectations; the mixture of developed city and rural villages is spectacular. The difference between each district is staggering, the city is so much larger than I had anticipated. Experiencing the sheer size of Saigon in person is much different than seeing it on a map. I enjoy the night life in Ho Chi Minh as well, the city really comes alive at night, and the streets always are filled with people. District 1 is particularly beautiful at night.

It’s a bit of a culture shock, being in a place where nobody can understand me, and I can’t understand them. It’s almost like being a baby again, where I end up having to communicate using hand gestures and the handful of words I know. Despite the language barrier, the people are generally very friendly, and they usually smile a bit when I try to say a few words to them in Vietnamese. Many people I have talked to also speak at least some English, so it is possible to have some conversation. Overall, I really love Ho Chi Minh, and could see myself spending more time here in the future.

As far as cultural questions go, I don’t really know what I don’t know. I have learned a few things that I never would have thought to ask about. For example, I learned that it is a sign of respect to take someone’s business card with two hands when it is offered to you. It would be nice to learn some more Vietnamese to communicate more effectively with my coworkers and people in general. I have always heard that the best way to learn a language is to live in a place where it is spoken, so working here should be extremely helpful in expanding my vocabulary.