{"id":60333,"date":"2024-08-30T16:02:49","date_gmt":"2024-08-30T20:02:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/simcenter\/?p=60333"},"modified":"2026-03-26T06:36:55","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T10:36:55","slug":"the-digital-twin-internship-for-high-school-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/simcenter\/the-digital-twin-internship-for-high-school-students\/","title":{"rendered":"The Digital Twin Internship for High School Students"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As a parent and a professional deeply invested in innovation, I\u2019ve always felt the need to bridge the gap between youthful dreams and real-world experiences. This was the driving force behind the Digital Twin internship we recently hosted at Siemens Leuven.<\/h2>\n\n\n
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The idea for this program took root during the early days of the pandemic. Like many parents, I had the chance to bring my son to the office, where he got a glimpse of what we do at Siemens. At that time, I was heavily involved in the Digital Twin initiative and the XDT project, and I realized how little young people, even my own son, truly understood about what goes on inside a tech company. Children often have big dreams \u2014 they want to be doctors, astronauts, inventors \u2014 but they rarely get a chance to see what these careers look like in practice. This realization planted the seed for an internship program aimed at high school students, offering them a unique opportunity to explore the professional world before making critical decisions about their future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to create an experience that wasn\u2019t just about learning technical skills, but about giving these students a comprehensive view of how a company operates. Over the past two weeks, three high school students joined us at Siemens Leuven, where they were immersed in everything from marketing to product management, development, legal, research, and even upper management. At just 16 years old, they were exposed to aspects of business life that most people don\u2019t encounter until much later in their careers. This is the kind of experience I hope to offer my own son when he reaches this age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The focus on Digital Twins wasn\u2019t accidental. It\u2019s a field I\u2019ve been passionate about for many years, and we had everything in place to make it a hands-on learning experience. The students started with a LEGO excavator \u2014 a project that\u2019s straightforward yet rich in learning potential. They installed sensors, calibrated them, and then used Simcenter Testlab to measure actual displacements. They didn\u2019t stop there; they connected these real-world measurements to virtual models in Simcenter Amesim, compressing the model into a Functional Mock-up Unit (FMU) and integrating it back into Testlab. This allowed them to experience how real and virtual worlds can interact, a key concept in the Digital Twin technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n