It is hard to believe that I already accomplished three years out of four to complete my bachelor in Electrical Engineering at Laval University. The past semester has been very challenging with a course named Design III, which is a multidisciplinary project that we did in team of eight people from different bachelor’s disciplines. The project involved the conception of a robot that needed to accomplish a series of different actions. The main goal of the robot was to follow a path that consists basically of avoiding the obstacles on a table, following by taking a picture of a particular image given as an instruction to the robot and returning to the base station to draw the contour of the image taken with a specific orientation and enlargement factor that was also given in the instructions to the robot. The instructions were given by an antenna and needed to be received, demodulated and decoded onboard the robot. We have successfully passed through this difficult course after hundreds of hard working hours. 

 

On another level, I also continued my involvement as the director of the Laval University Aerospace Group that we call GAUL in French. At the beginning of the year, we did a lot of recruitment to keep our team growing up and we are always getting bigger and of course better. We are going to participate in a few weeks to the 2017 Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) that will be held during the first Spaceport America Cup in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The event will take place from June 20 to June 24 at the Spaceport America facilities. We are thrilled to participate this year too to such an amazing competition gathering teams from all around the world. We have worked very hard on the last year to build a better rocket than we ever did and we hope that we will get a great scoring this year too. 

 

Finally, I am doing an internship this summer at MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) in Montreal. I am working with the antenna proposal team, so I have the chance to learn how to design some specific RF antennas that are installed on geostationary satellites. It is a very challenging internship, but I am getting better every day as I learn how to use all the options we are able to deal with when using the multiple software’s we are working with on a daily basis. I am so glad to be able to have this opportunity since working at MDA was one of my biggest dreams as I am so passionate by the aerospace industry. I wish you all a very nice summer wherever you are in Canada and the best of luck in all of your projects.