My first internship, taken the summer between junior and senior year, gave me an early, hands-on introduction to electrical engineering before I'd had any formal coursework or field experience.

In AUTOCAD I drafted pole details (field schematics used by technicians building electrical poles), performed redlining (incorporating revisions from supervisors/clients), and rebuilt title blocks by migrating data between formats. I garnered PLS-CADD exposure by shadowing newly hired overhead-design engineers, gaining familiarity with the industry-standard software for engineering transmission and distribution lines. Moving onto site mapping, my most substantive contribution, this is where my skillset took off. Early work involved relabeling lines and marking proposed additions or removals; this progressed to more exacting tasks such as correcting layer/line types, verifying pole classifications and heights, and cross-referencing run lengths against a county surveyor map to a five-foot tolerance. This was real quality-control work feeding into utility infrastructure planning for local energy companies. Lastly, I learned much about quality review by sitting in on design reviews for a substation component replacement, learning how parts counts, change tracking, and drawing accuracy checks work in practice.

I still had much to learn at the end of the summer, however, regulation and code related work remained beyond me, I could shadow the training but not execute it independently. That gap is the honest marker of where a first internship like this tops out: enough exposure to understand the discipline's shape, not yet the depth to operate unsupervised on its harder problems.

Net assessment: I went from zero CAD experience to independently producing pole details and handling detailed GDE verification work within about six weeks. A fast, concrete ramp for a first exposure to the field, this experience gave me real confidence heading into engineering coursework the year after.