Skip to main content

Expectations and Goals

I have known I wanted to be an engineer for a long time. I enjoy problem-solving and have always had excellent spatial reasoning. I began tinkering at a young age with old computers and RC cars. At 11 I ruined one of my RC cars trying to drive it on water. I was still so happy because it skimmed on water for a good three seconds before the frame caught and dragged it down. The only failure was not sealing off the electronics well enough but I was so happy to have done something without a kit or instructions. It was all around fun. I kept going with legos, robots, computer programs, I got to know my way around a wood shop freshmen year and learned about 3d printing and machine guided cutting from CNC machining to laser cutting. As I leave for college I feel completely prepared to tackle any engineering challenge that comes my way. I have a strong base in math and calculus that can only grow in the years to come. And an even stronger base of experience with tinkering and making things.

I am very excited for this internship because in my experience I have not been exposed a lot to the real world of engineering other than watching racing and project car builds. I want to learn about manufacturing and process engineering. Working with a team of engineers significantly more experienced than me and who have been doing this for years will show me what to expect during internships and a career out of college.

I know I want to be an engineer I don't plan on using this internship to test my interests. I want to leave this internship well learned. I am curious if I find great interest in the aeronautics industry. I have always been very interested in cars so as I was looking at colleges I figured I'd go to that; however, there is more money in aeronautics and the jets I will be working on are incredible. I am going to a college with excellent networking in automotive and aeronautic engineering so I have a way to both industries but I want to see which I like better before sophomore year. This is a step towards knowing that better. In the two and a half weeks I will be there I don't expect to contribute an enormous amount because of the experience and age difference but if I leave the two projects having one of my Ideas used I would be ecstatic.

Comments

  1. UnknownMay 21, 2018 at 1:07 PM

    I am really excited to see your learning develop throughout your time in this intensive. I believe your time and talent will get utilized as you ask questions, seek answers, and participate in the experience. Good luck! I will be following along.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 2

Today I learned a lot more about organization and documentation. Mark, my program manager, has an excel dashboard program that he uses to easily look up pieces and projects. He can look up jobs by Jedco's part number, the partner's part number, or the part's find number. It gives him back a lot of information about the part including tools used in the process, cost, quote, profit margins, and issues and comments. On one of the parts he was looking it up but none of the information was being brought back. So, in an effort to learn an important skill for engineering jobs and jobs in general, I taught myself Visual Basic, the language behind Excel formulas. At the end of the tutorial I was skimming and after about two hours of reading the code behind Mark's dashboard, I couldn't find any errors so I asked the person who wrote the code about the references and some clarifications about the code just to make sure I was clear on everything. At the end of it all, we realiz
1 comment
Read more

Day 4

There exists no perfect environment and, as an engineer, it is made my goal to make a perfect environment. I made the first sheet I was working on work. Since I worked out the bugs on that one and improved the functionality I got an explanation of the 5s system and Toyotas Lean engineering philosophy to understand the impact of what I was doing. The Lean system and the 5s system are philosophies that all good engineering companies hold which say the organization of work and the standardization upfront pay off astronomically in the long run. Tyler, who I work with did his thesis on the last company he worked at about implementing Lean engineering, and the impact of it on the company because the company didn't hold the philosophy at all. Tyler determined that the company could save $50,000 a year by organizing workspaces, purchasing tools for each workspace instead of making the production team walking across the plant when they need a new tool on each assembly. Needless to say, th
1 comment
Read more