I didn't know Panasonic was that big until I walked into their office

Honest admission: before March 17th, I thought of Panasonic as a consumer electronics brand. TVs, cameras, batteries. I had no idea how deep the B2B side ran — until I got off at Newark Penn Station, crossed the street, and walked into Two Riverfront Plaza.

The day moved fast. Career pathway talks, two job shadowing sessions, lunch with the engineering team, a Q&A to close. But the things that actually stayed with me weren't on the schedule.

Curtis Carpenter's team showed us a chatbot they'd built for internal help desk requests. On paper, that sounds like a "we put AI on it" checkbox. But the way Curtis walked through it reframed how I think about tooling: the help desk was drowning in repetitive questions that didn't need a human, and every ticket processed manually was engineering hours gone. The chatbot wasn't impressive because it used AI — it was impressive because it solved one specific, measurable problem and nothing else. Scope is a feature.

Vishnu Ramlakhan took us through a supply chain workflow that was hard to fully absorb. I build hardware projects — I know what it takes to get a component from a vendor to a breadboard. Watching Panasonic manage that across manufacturers, regions, and logistics partners at a global scale was a good reminder of how much invisible infrastructure sits behind the things people actually touch.

Lunch was the best part. The engineers were candid in a way you rarely get — honest about early-career mistakes, what skills actually transfer versus what just looks good, how to navigate pivots. I came in with questions and left with better ones.

One unexpected thing: I mentioned running a cloud computing club at Rutgers and that we had a workshop coming up. Over lunch, Rashaun Goodall suggested building it around the ESP32 — gave me enough to go on. I'm running it this Friday.

That's always how it goes — the thing that matters most doesn't show up on any agenda.