During the summer of 2025, I worked at AndyMark Inc. as a Mechanical Engineering Intern. AndyMark produces components for industrial, educational, and competition robotics. They are most famous for their partnership with FIRST, which engages with over 800k students across the world. This was my first internship ever and what I would call my first “real” job (although I worked a couple jobs previously).
AndyMark’s engineering team was about 9 people strong when I joined, and was spread across multiple disciplines. I worked under Nathan Massuda, a Senior Mechanical Engineer. Since I was only a freshman, my role was largely supporting the engineering efforts and what one could call “grunt work”. As stated by multiple of my superiors, my pace and productivity was greater than their expectations which led to them often having to find tasks for me to do since I would finish my assigned work ahead of schedule.
AndyMark is an all-in-one company. They handle logistics (warehousing+packaging+distribution), manufacturing, and engineering all under one roof. While many of the products they vendor are made by AndyMark, they also retail quite a few third party components. This made prototyping exceptionally easy though as instead of placing a McMaster or Xometry order, I could get all the materials from the warehouse, do the machining in the shop, and assemble it myself.
I am keeping most of the details here brief due to most of my work not being super interesting. There was still a lot of thought, engineering, and work put into all of my projects, even if it is not as clearly highlighted like my other posts.
Grunt Work
For lack of a better term, most of my initial work was miscellaneous tasks to support the team and get into the engineering workflow. They ran things in a traditional manner where designs were created in SolidWorks before technical drawings were submitted for review. I learned pretty quickly how attentive to details one must be in creating technical drawings, so it took an embarrassing amount of attempts to get my first drawing aproved, but after that, I was smooth sailing.
The following are some of the “grunt work” tasks I did:
- Update drawings to meet new standards
- Create/update drawings of 3rd party components
- Assist with fatigue/stress tests (fancy term for pressing a button or driving a robot around)
- conducting market research to change the quantity of components in kits
- using existing sales data to advise changes to when we should stock up in anticipation of sales
Product Development
I was entrusted with the full end-to-end product development life cycle for a couple of parts. This included market research, design, prototyping, testing, iteration, DFM (Design For Manufacturing), and manufacturing sampling. Below is the list of products.
- Robot Cart (for FRC teams)
- Kraken X60 compatible pinion gears and gear boxes
- New metal gussets and brackets
Testing and Validation
I created multiple jigs, rigs, fixtures, and rubrics to test both my products and existing ones. This was not only for validating that the products we were shipping were able to take a beating, but to also provide comprehensive data sheets. Testing often focused on stress testing (how much load it can withstand) and fatigue tasting (how many times can it take the load and for how long). The most interesting test rig I developed was one for assessing the expansion of compliant wheels of varying durometer at different spin rates. I assembled a rig that used a motor, tachometer, and high speed camera to determine the RPM of the wheel and the median diameter of the wheel at said RPM.
Conclusion
I learned a lot from this internship, especially in terms of refining my mechanical engineering and DFM skills. I got to work along side engineers from many disciplines and collaborated with machinists in making my ideas a reality. However, it wasn’t so great being the only intern there (I was quite socially isolated) and having to live in the middle-of-nowhere Kokomo, Indiana without a car (I walked 45min to and from work alongside a 2 lane highway with pickup trucks going 60+ mph).