Student testimonial
Data exchange between field and farm
I’m in the second year of the Biosystems Engineering master's and I am currently pursuing my internship. Previously I did a bachelor's in agricultural engineering, also in Wageningen. I’m very interested in the agricultural sector because at the moment, a lot of innovation is happening in this industry to ensure that everybody will have access to enough food in the future.
I find the internship really useful, you get to know a company really well and you also learn a lot about yourself.
During the study of Biosystems Engineering, you are educated to communicate with both the farmer and the “hard-core” engineer. You get to know something from different fields of engineering (software, mechanical, etc.), but will not go into the details of these fields. The master's programme has an internship of four months which can be done via multiple chair groups.
I’m doing my internship via the Information Technology group (INF) and I’m situated at the Kverneland Group Mechatronics BV in Nieuw-Vennep, the Netherlands , where I work with the research and development department in the telematics team. This company manufactures and develops control systems for agricultural equipment. The tractor terminals that are developed could be the basis for precision framing. Currently, a telematics system is being developed that allows the data exchange between the field and the farm, where the farmers can track their machines, analyse the data and send tasks to perform different precision farming tasks within the field.
My role here during the internship is to design and implement different load tests for the newly developed system. For this purpose, I’ve made an application that can simulate the load of multiple users using the web application and an application that can simulate the load of multiple tractors uploading data to a database. This will ensure that that the system will run smoothly without fail under big loads, while maintaining the same user experience. The results will be used to determine a (server) growth strategy for the telematics system.
Personally, I find the internship really useful, you get to know a company really well and you also learn a lot about yourself. The thing that I want to advise is to choose an internship that you are really enthusiastic about, don’t always choose the easy way!