LSU Industrial Engineering Grad Student Interns With Tesla
October 4, 2023
BATON ROUGE, LA – LSU Industrial Engineering graduate student Min Pun is braving the Texas heat while he interns at Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas in Austin this fall. Pun, who is originally from Nepal, has worked for Tesla before and jumped at the chance to have an internship there again.
In 2021, Pun was offered a summer internship at Tesla’s Gigafactory Nevada (less than an hour from Lake Tahoe), where he served as a quality engineering intern working on projects related to Statistical Process Control, Gage R&R, Non-Conformance, Root Cause Analysis, PFMEA, and Control Plans. According to Tesla’s website, Gigafactory Nevada is one of the world’s highest volume plants for electric motors, energy storage products, vehicle powertrains, and batteries, producing billions of cells per year.
Pun enjoyed his Gigafactory Nevada internship so much that, in 2023, he began a fall internship at Gigafactory Texas in Austin, serving again as a quality engineering intern.
“In Nevada, I worked on Model 3/Y battery packs, where I was drafting the control charts for high-voltage joints of battery packs and also the validation study for the new End of Line testers; whereas in Austin, I’m working on a project related to Cyber Truck’s Drive Unit, where I am trying to compile and analyze the program files for Drive Unit parts’ dimensional measurements,” Pun said.
What Pun enjoys most about his internship in Austin is the “ever-learning environment, open-door policy, hands-on experience, and personal growth aspect of his internship,” he said. He’s also loving the city that likes to “keep it weird.”
“I loved both of my internships, but I love Austin as a city,” Pun said. “Austin is great as there are so many places to explore nearby, work is accessible to downtown and the airports, and on top of that, people are amazing here. I’ve only been here for a month, but in my free time, I’ve been visiting amazing restaurants, food trucks, and artsy places with my friends.”
Austin is nearly seven hours from Baton Rouge, but LSU is a long way from Nepal, where Pun was born and raised. He moved to the U.S. in 2014, when he enrolled at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, La., to work on his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He then went to work for medical device company Zimmer Biomet as a quality engineer before deciding to work on his master’s in industrial engineering at LSU.
“While working for Zimmer Biomet, I realized there is a massive gap between what I studied in my undergrad and what I was doing there, mainly through the perspective of the course and concepts that I learned in my undergraduate degree,” Pun said. “Concepts like statistical analysis, quality management, process improvement, lean methodologies, which are crucial aspects of Quality Engineering (QE), were missing in undergrad. When I was applying to grad school and the majors that align more with QE, I learned about industrial engineering at LSU.”
Pun chose to attend LSU to earn his master’s in industrial engineering after hearing about the variety of research conducted at LSU while he was in Lake Charles.
“Louisiana always felt like home away from home—the people, the food, and the culture are so reminiscent of back home,” he said. “LSU has always been my top choice for its strong academic programs, faculty expertise, and research opportunities.”
Pun, who graduates this fall, plans to work in the automobile industry as a quality/process engineer.
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