I Learned How to Build a Microchip by Designing a Hotel Lobby

When I told my computer engineering friends I got a co-op designing low-voltage systems for buildings, I got a few confused looks.

“So… you’re not coding?” they’d ask.

“Nope,” I’d say. “I’m using CAD to figure out where to put security cameras and Wi-Fi access points in a new hotel. It’s thrilling.”

I was mostly joking, but I was also a little worried. Here I was, a student of the microscopic world of transistors and logic gates, spending my days in the macroscopic world of concrete, drywall, and blueprints. It felt like I was on a completely different career path.

But then, a funny thing happened. As I spent more time drawing lines on a digital blueprint, I realized I wasn't designing a building's electrical system. I was designing a giant, slow-moving, human-scale circuit board.

And it was the best computer engineering class I’ve ever taken.

Big Blueprints, Tiny Circuits

In computer engineering, we deal with things so small you can’t see them. We learn about billions of transistors packed onto a chip the size of your fingernail. It’s all abstract, theoretical, and honestly, a little hard to wrap your head around.

But in my co-op, I was basically doing the same thing, just zoomed in—way, way in.

The wires I was routing through walls for data, security, and fire alarms? Those were the traces on a circuit board, carrying information from one point to another.

The components I was placing—the smoke detectors, Wi-Fi hubs, and security cameras? They were just like the transistors, resistors, and logic gates on a chip. Each one has a specific job.

The strict building codes and rules I had to follow? That’s just design rule checking for a microchip. You can't run a data cable too close to a high-voltage line because of electrical interference. On a chip, you can't run a trace too close to another or the signal will get corrupted.

Suddenly it all clicked. I wasn't just placing a camera in a hallway; I was learning about system architecture, signal integrity, and component placement. I was practicing the exact same systems thinking needed to design a complex microprocessor, but on a scale I could literally walk through.

The Power of a Misplaced Pixel

This job taught me more than just a cool new way to think about circuits. It taught me some things you can’t learn from a textbook.

Attention to Detail is Everything

I once spent a day designing the data port layout for a hotel room. I put a port right in the middle of a wall—perfectly centered, clean, and beautiful on my screen. Weeks later, I learned I had placed it directly behind where the giant, 200-pound wooden headboard was being bolted. That data port was now officially the world's most useless wall decoration.

One tiny pixel out of place on my screen created a real-world headache. It was a hilarious and humbling lesson that a single misplaced semicolon in a million lines of code, or one faulty gate in a billion transistors, can bring the entire system crashing down. Measure twice, cut once. Or in my case, check the furniture plan before you place a port.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work (and the Building Stand Up)

On my screen, I could draw a line from point A to point B and call it a day. In reality, that line was a cable that had to pass through walls, ceilings, and floors owned by other people. I had to talk to the architects ("Can I run a wire here?"), the electricians ("Will your power lines mess with my signal?"), and the interior designers ("No, you can't hang a Wi-Fi access point from that priceless chandelier.").

It's the exact same in tech. The hardware team can’t build a chip without talking to the software team. The software team can't write code without understanding the hardware's limits. If you don’t communicate, you end up with a useless data port behind a headboard.

It turns out that building anything complex, whether it’s a hotel or a computer, is less about individual genius and more about a group of people successfully not messing up each other’s work. And that was a lesson I really needed.

So yeah, my co-op wasn't what I expected. I thought I'd be writing code, but instead, I was drawing lines. But those lines taught me how systems fit together, why every tiny detail matters, and how to work with a team to build something amazing—be it a skyscraper or a silicon chip.