Shoal Interns 2020

On Friday 22 November, Shoal’s team welcomed our 2020 interns at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) event: Australia’s Race for Space, where they were formally welcomed by Dr Megan Clark AC, Head of the Australian Space Agency.

Shoal’s Summer Internship offers a 12 week, paid internship for a team of undergraduate students from any university across Australia. This year, we selected five students to work at our head office in Adelaide, working closely with a technical supervisor to research and develop their own idea.

As part of their application, the intern applicants pitched an idea to work on throughout the internship. This year’s theme was about space based earth observation. The task was:

With access to space becoming more affordable and many more satellites observing the planet, we now have an abundance of satellite imagery of the Earth, along with chemical, biological and physical systems data. We want you to consider how to use this imagery and / or data and what value it can add to humanity

Their ideas ranged from agricultural monitoring for crop health, animal tracking to combat poaching, refugee boat monitoring and tracking of oceanic objects (such as refugee boats or oil spills) to aircraft tracking and response systems.

Our five interns will work together to select one concept, mentored and supported to progress their project, while developing skills in engineering and experiencing the Shoal culture.

Pictured back row L – R Conor MacDonald, Kevin Robinson, Victoria Myers, Matthew Vella, Michael Waite, Ken the astronaut, Albert Sztolc (Engineering Intern), Thomas Jacquier, Nikita Sardesai, Parichay Shah.

Pictured front row L – R are four of our Engineering Interns, Rijul Ramkumar, Jordan Kildare, Oscar Walsh and Ross Fraser, along with John Furness.