Mihitha Nutakki

Having spent six years learning about product development, I get to apply this acquired knowledge daily to products in the energy sector at Schlumberger. Working in a large organization and in a diverse team in the New Product Development division keeps me engaged in the learning loop every day. The major differences in the products that I have worked on in the past to the present ones are the physical scale and the extreme operating conditions.

"The word design is everything and nothing. The design and the product itself are inseparable."— Jonathan Ive

Developing a product from start to finish is always an experience to cherish. I see each of the processes involved in development, such as identifying the need for the product, brainstorming ideas for solution, prototyping, testing, building the product and then testing again as a design challenge. These challenges make this field very exciting.

Dismantling various products around the house with the help of my elder brother was a favorite pastime of mine during childhood. Slowly, this activity transformed into re-assembling of the dismantled components to create working products (the term I would use for this today would be reverse engineering). Later in my sophomore year at college, I built a couple of manually controlled robots, a stair climber and a robotic arm for competitions. In those competitions, I was thrilled to see automated bots in other events and found the idea of automation fascinating. I started learning about autonomous bots and built a line following hovercraft for a subsequent competition. It performed well, and that inspired me to learn more. At Stanford, I expanded my knowledge by studying about Artificial Intelligence and how it can be applied not only to robots but also to various other fields.