How did I get my first internship?
Discover Tectoria 2023
My first internship ever was at University of Victoria (UVic). I was very lucky to get this internship. Clubs day is a day at UVic usually in September promoting various student clubs. Engineers and Computer Science students have their own clubs day separated from the rest of the university.
In 2022 Septempber, as a new student, I was a happy nerd walking around awkwardly investigating amazing engineering clubs’ projects. Then I walked into a student. She also said she is new to UVic too! She said she is heavily interested in AR/VR. This was crazy for me. I have spent past 2 years telling my friends and family that I want to devote my life to AR/VR industry. And here a randome person says they are also investigated into this!
Turns out, this person is Dr. Marianne Black. I thought she was a student! Later that day, I emailed her (interestingly in that email, I talked about Hololabs. More story about this later) and we continued to geeking out in email. In the winter of 2022, I asked her if she has any career advice. She suggested me to make a personal website. That’s how this github io started.
I showed her this personal website and she offered me an undergraduate research assistant job! My parents never went to a graduate school so I didn’t know what research assistant was. This is how my career started.
What was my job?
Lucas VR Hand (this is not our office. This picture was taken at UVEEC club because I had access to their soldering work station
My research lab (It used to be called Health Assistive Technology lab) was focusing on using mixed reality to disturb pain perception during cryneurolysis. Because Victoria is a great retirement city, we had a lot of chronic pain patients. Cryneurolysis is a medical procedure that uses liquid nitrogen to freeze targeted peripheral nerves and block pain or spasticity.
Victoria General Hospital had one of the best cryneurolysis specialist in the world, Dr. Paul Winston. We found that patients going through cryneurolysis had unbearable amount of pain during the procedure. We cannot put patients into anesthesia because we need to know which nerve is causing the issue. Furthermore, Victoria was having severe number of fantanyl drug addicts downtown at that time. So we had to find an alternative way (no pain killers) of reducing pain. So, how about using Mixed Reality to disturb the pain?
We used Magic Leap 2. It was a brand-new see-through AR glasses with a compute pack designed for doctors. Great eye tracking with calibration. Supported Unity to build apks on it. Separate compute pack just like Apple Vision Pro (was not released at that time). Magic Leap is a Florida based company later acquired by Saudi Arabia. That acquisition killed R&D for next product.
I also built a Lucas VR glove to study more about relationship between pain and our perception. If we could recreate pain just by belief (like a rubber hand experiment), then we might also be able to reduce it as well. It was an interesting topic and I had a great time building prototypes during that summer. I ended up not publishing any paper. I had too much fun reading research papers and developing prototypes.
I had co-workers. It was Kai Michaud and Maya Daniels. Kai was just like me but brighter and more intelligent. He was also very interested in game development using Unity like me. Great philosopher as well. Maya did not have any background in Unity. However, she was one of the most professional people I have ever met. In short time, she was able to pick up Unity skills quickly and also made a hand off documentation for the next person in time.
What have you learned?
Just like Steve Jobs once said, asking for help does work! I have learned that my motivation is heavily inspired by passion and I am not alone. I also learned that motivation by passion (me) is dangerous. Disciplination, professionalism and small habits truly go further than solely depending on passion.