Ryan Gross, Student, Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Name: Ryan Gross

Birthplace: Vienna, Virginia

Major: Electrical Engineering

Classification: Senior

Name and location of company where you are on co-op: Duke Energy, Plainfield IN

What are your job duties?

Worked on various small projects and shadowed a mentor for each of three sessions with three different departments in transmission engineering. The first in protection and controls, where I found the most electrical engineering work. The second in project management, where I got a broader view of the company and saw how a project gets run from conception to construction. I am just finishing up my final session with Substation Engineering. This work is a lot more civil/structural, but I still really enjoyed it. In general, transmission engineering is about getting power from generation stations to customers. With this, the majority of my work centered around designing, updating, and maintaining substations. For those that may not know what that is, they are the fenced off areas (usually along the street) where transmission lines meet, and the voltage is stepped down from a higher line voltage to a lower distribution voltage that goes out to customers.

What did you hope to gain from this experience?

Overall, I hoped to gain a better understanding of our electric grid and how it works. I am more than happy to say that I got all that and more from this experience.

Have you completed other co-op sessions as a Purdue ECE student?

I am currently in my third of 3 sessions with Duke.

What is your ultimate career goal?

At this point, I would definitely like to keep working on our electric grid in my future career. There is so much work to be done and everyone will always need electricity, so the job security is amazing. In the future I may look to get more into the generation side of the grid with the idea of a small nuclear reactors looking like more and more of a real possibility.

Learn more about Co-Op opportunities here.