# Experience Reflection on My BMW Lab TEEP Internship

## Background
I'm Anna, a Ukrainian sophomore student in the field of Computer Science and Engineering. I'm fond of embedded and low-level programming and hardware development, an open-source and Gentoo Linux adept and am casually interested in science and technology novelties as well as curious about theoretical mathematics (but I'm planning to take a deeper dive into this).

I finished two grades of university and during this time, I had a 9-months experience of working with hardware devices for Ultrasonic Railway Testing, which was a very interesting field. Due to the war outrage in my country, I was under the necessity of leaving the country. That's when I found out about the TEEP program online.

## Daily Life at the Lab
My average day at the lab was similar to the following:

| Time | Action |
| ----- | ------ |
| 09:00 | Entering the lab and logging into the HackMD account, opening FlexRIC source code and quickly planning goals for this day. |
| 09:20 | Starting to work on the outlined goals one by one, adding remarks to my note. |
| 11:00 | Eat lunch: it's very delicious :D. Most of the times, I ate noodles or some food in the buffet. |
| 11:40 | Back to lab, continue work. |
| 14:00 | Actually, most of the days I completed my goals a few hours earlier than 17:00, so, after completing it, I had a couple of free hours. I spent them on my [background knowledge](https://hackmd.io/lOBW-F2JT_q_3g9XvW2kXg?view=) extension. I like to read a bit of extra theory whenever I have some free time. |
| 17:00 | Log out of HackMD, be free! |

## Reflection
During the internship, I was lucky to have the invaluable experience of reading and analyzing the source code of FlexRIC, which strengthened my general understanding of mobile networks, Radio Access Technology and new generation mobile networks architecture in general, despite FlexRIC having a fairly different architecture in comparison to OSC RIC.

Another eye-opening experience was related to team work. I've always been convinced that the only way to achieve the greatest success (and, not unlike my previous experience) is to work on your own. This summer, however, one quote from the initial TEEP meeting changed my mind:

> If you want to Walk Fast, Walk Alone! But if you want to Walk Far, Walk Together!

This quote is actually consistent with all I accomplished previously, while pointing out the actual value of team work. It's definitely true that by working or studying alone, it's easy to progress at a much faster rate. However, most of the times, there is a limiting point, after which it's possible to proceed only by cooperation with other colleagues. That's the reason why we have conferences, standardization organizations and collaboration in the fields of science and technology. In 1870 it was still easy to invent or discover something major on your own, but modern science and engineering require collaboration of teams or even large organizations.

I tried to work together with other students, have disputes and discussions, and it was very efficient for better outcomes!

During this summer, I met a lot of nice people in the lab, some of them were local, and some of them were international students as well. I had fun in the free time, and learned a lot during the internship time.

## Summary
If you are in doubt whether to join the TEEP internship or not, ask yourself two questions:
* Am I curious about mobile networks?
* Do I want to strengthen my technical abilities, expand my knowledge and experience, communicate and collaborate with other international students, and immerse to a new culture, with the tastiest cuisine, beautiful mountains scenery and Shiba Inu?

If the answer to both questions is positive, I would readily recommend to join the BMW lab. And I'd like to thank Professor Ray for organizing the laboratory, as well as Bimo, Mick, and Yueh-Huan for being a mentor for the RIC Team. I'm looking forward to joining the lab again one day.