#iamExeter: Anika ’26
An Exeter internship brings students beyond the classroom and into real-world experiences.
From a business development internship with an oyster farm to exploring genome studies at the Hubbard Center, Exeter’s Internship & Fellowship programs are top-notch. Each summer, a group of rising seniors takes what they’ve learned at the table and brings it with them to their field of interest. Hear from Anika Sivarasa ’26 as she shares highlights from her bioengineering internship in Scottsdale, Arizona.
What was your internship program?
I participated in the Patient-Inspired Bioengineering Internship at Mayo Clinic Scottsdale, where I got the opportunity to intern in a lab developing a drug-delivering millirobot. My project focused on optimizing the magnet system that controls the millirobot, helping to make it viable for clinical use.
What did your day-to-day look like during your program? Was it fast-paced meetings? Research-based? Give us a glimpse into a typical day.
My first two weeks were spent exploring the lab’s ongoing research projects, studying the theory behind magnetic microrobots, and learning how to use simulation software. In the mornings, I decided which configurations I wanted to simulate, created setup diagrams, and derived expressions for the values I wanted to measure. My mentor encouraged me to manually compute values for simpler test cases to “sanity check” my results; it was tedious, but eventually came in handy!
How did you find your way to this program? What pulled you to this industry?
I first became interested in medical robotics when I saw a YouTube video of a soft robot navigating through a human’s colon to perform a surgical procedure. I didn’t know Mayo Clinic would have any medical robotics labs, though, and applied to this summer program because I was amazed by Mayo Clinic’s research impact, from injectable liquids that could seal off blood vessels to a wound-healing patch. After I got the internship, the coordinator on the Mayo Clinic side connected me with the director of the medical microrobots lab, whose projects perfectly matched my interests.
In what ways did Exeter prepare you for this internship? Was there a specific course or mentor that helped you get ready for your experience?
Understanding the 3D magnetic forces and torques on the magnetic millirobot required concepts from the multivariable calculus class I’d taken and built on concepts I’d learned in physics. In fact, my current physics class is covering these topics applied to other components, like motors or generators. My computer-aided design skills from robotics also helped when modifying millirobot models and creating a simplified human body model to display my results. Overall, I think having foundational experiences in robotics, math, and physics allowed me to take on a larger role during my internship.
What was your biggest takeaway from your experience or from the industry you were a part of?
The most important thing I learned was how to self-guide my research instead of relying on my mentor for tasks. I initially had no clue how to map a real-life millirobot’s operating conditions to a simulation environment, but I ended up trying out so many original ideas, including a completely different actuation system that I later realized would overheat extremely quickly.
How has this experience shaped your perspective on your future career path? Did it help you understand whether this is an industry you’d want to pursue long term?
This internship definitely made me want to pursue something related to medical devices in the future. I was already pretty sure from robotics that I wanted to go into engineering, but in this internship, I enjoyed being able to apply engineering to something that could reduce medical complications caused by standard tools like catheters. It was also valuable to hear my mentor’s thoughts on working in this interdisciplinary field while having a background in a “core” engineering field, since he had studied electrical engineering before specializing in biomedical engineering, which is what I’m thinking of doing.
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