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Josh’s Quotes #12

[377-415; 496-510; 656-673] Our fluids professor can be a bit hard on us. It does get annoying since I’m coming here to learn, not get chastised for asking questions. He definitely knows what he’s talking about and good at explaining. He called on random people in lectures. One time, I was working on a homework. I’m trying to be efficient by making a table, I asked him if it’s acceptable, and his response threw me off guard. He said, “Yes, but you should ask what’s the maximum I can do instead of minimum.” In my mind, I’m just trying to be efficient and make it easier to read.

For micro lab, I asked my professor a lot of questions. She would explain it until I understood. Knowing when you have a problem and seeking out the help before it becomes an issue that you can’t solve. I have a lot of interactions with faculties in school. The new professor has become a very good person to talk to because usually after I asked her a question about a lab report, we discus about how things goes for 40 minutes.

During an event orientation, a professor I had last semester pat my shoulder to say hello, so later I walked to his office. Even though we are both busy, we still talked for 20 minutes about my co-op and how I’m doing in school. The machine design professor sat down with me before this exam because I feel like I’m going to fail. He made me answer the questions to prove that I knew enough to what I was talking about to do decent on the exam. It’s also finding the time to relax in situations where it feels like I have none. I feel like it’s evident that I talked to my professors. I am very open about things going on in my life.

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Josh’s Quotes #13

[545-702] I know a lot of the people in engineering program. I tend to interact with four to six people on a regular day because I’ve gotten to know them over the past three years. We have classes together and see each other in other extracurriculars. I have general interaction with everyone in the program. I’ve always been the student who answers questions. A lot of people in the program have been reluctant to talk to me because I acted like a teacher’s pet. As I’ve been put into classes with more people, they started to realize I’m also having the same struggles as they are. My interaction with my peers has increased a lot this past few weeks. A lot of the interaction is during the day in classes.

To navigating through low points, it was a lot of self-reflecting on other people. When I was in the fall, I was getting extremely overwhelmed by my math class. For about two weeks, I was struggling to stay positive and get my work done. It was my past experiences to convince myself that the struggles are only temporary. Another point was brought to my attention that my classmates and I talk about a lot. I won’t take any classes in the spring. My peers and I agree that we had to go through this fall because we were coming back in the spring. We are so busy that we don’t have time to realize how fast is fast. I know pretty much everyone in the program, but a majority of people have different methodology than me.

Sometimes, students gather in the civil engineering building, and I don’t even know when they get there. Tuesday afternoon they stay there till 4:00 in the morning doing work. While working with my peers, we have same methods. That’s reflected in the people that I do spend most of my time with. We start ahead of time so that we not only don’t have to work at hard-last minute but also we can ask questions. It’s picking and choosing which peers I know are going to help me, and I do sometimes go to sessions with other people. We study and work with each other.

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Josh’s Quotes #14

[628-648; 729-742] There’s only so much self-repair you can do when you get knocked back down. It’s just the general feeling of anxiety in academics. If I don’t get this done, I’m going to work much harder later. The best way I can describe it is notice change and recognizing the change in behavior was how I get through difficulties.

The past four months have definitely been some of the biggest areas of growth that I’ve personally had in my life. I gained a lot of experience from the real world. I’ve had 12 jobs since 14, but none of them were engineering jobs. Having an engineering job allowed me to be used to professional. That taught me even if the concepts don’t apply, there is a baser reasoning to what I’m doing. I can look at a problem now and solve it without any help. If zero is not an engineer and 10 is an engineer, I put myself at six or seven. Purely because I don’t think getting out of school and getting an engineer job makes me an engineer. There’s an additional component that can only be found with experience and time. Getting the degree put me up from six or seven to an eight.

This afternoon, I’m updating my resume and choose where I want to go. As long as it fits their requirements that they lay out before me with time. My professor had to come visit the company I worked out for over the summer to see that I’m doing meaningful work and they’re taking care of me. I am still looking for an internship. Because my school is so involved in community, I can find a position that get me experiences that I need to achieve before I graduate.

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Josh’s Quotes #15

[317-335] During winter break, I went home for Christmas, and was able to see my family. I felt happy with that. Then I was starting in a new job. The interesting thing about this job, last summer when I got my internship, I had applied to probably 20 or so places. That was the one place that gave me an offer. It wasn’t like my last choice. It ended up being really the perfect choice for me, it just fell into place. But this time around I knew I wanted to stay on campus. That limited my search to somewhere within 20 miles so that I didn’t want to commute very long every day from campus. I waited probably almost halfway through the semester just looking at places, thinking, “Would this be a good match? What do I want to do?” Then an opportunity opened up at a company that I knew about, but I forget what I thought they did. But it didn’t sound interesting. Then I was like, “Well, now I’m interested.”

I kind of put all my eggs in one basket. If at any point there’s a disclaimer you can put in, I would say, I don’t recommend that people do that. It’s very risky and I probably wouldn’t do it again. But I reached out to the company, I had contacts who were alumni. I went the extra mile and I wrote a cover letter, I got letters of recommendation if I needed them. I applied for only that job because it was the only job I wanted and it’s the job I got. I got really lucky there. Well, I guess not lucky, I guess, I earned what I got in my opinion. But that’s I think important as well.

[339-361] A professor that just retired from our school was actually an employee at the company at one point. I reached out to her and she gave me some tips and tricks, and she was happy for me. I had the people in the alumni department that hooked me up with someone in the company that would put in a good word for me. Those connections were good too. I think those resources were crucial in getting me in, getting my interview, and securing the position that I really wanted.

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Josh’s Quotes #16

[5-62] As a result, this semester I’m working for a company and it has five major divisions. There’s paper, lumber, hydro, and then I forget what the other two are. One might be petroleum. But I worked in the Hydro division. The Hydro division designs, manufacturers, and rehabilitates turbines and other components for hydro-power. I worked in the turbine team. I was a turbine engineering intern. Like most internships, I did pretty much what was needed of me. But it definitely was not like, “Go get us coffee, go file this meaningless paperwork so that you have something to do.” It was actual work that applies to the things I’m learning in school and it gives me experience that I’ll be able to take moving forward. Actually, there were some Excel spreadsheet things they wanted me to fill. Then there are also a lot of situations they would hand me a technical drawing and they would say, “We need you to remodel this and make a new drawing because this one is out of date.” I would do that. There were a few design projects I was actually in on where I was able to come up with the design that would be used for various things in the field. If there’s anything else I can say about that, but that’s pretty much the general overview of my experience at my internship.

[112-128] Interestingly, the onboarding process was different at this company in comparison to last summer. When I started at the company, at my internship last summer, it was a lot of interns. They put us in a room and gave us a presentation. But at this company, I was the only intern at the beginning. Since then, there’s only been one or two others that I’ve seen. It’s a different type of thing. They didn’t have an orientation day set up for me, but what they had, it’s called an eight by eight by eight. It goes eight hours, eight days, eight weeks. You have a list of things that you need to do, and you have a contact for doing that. Then you have a place for them to sign once you complete it. Some of the stuff was read the code of conduct, go on our website. There was a PowerPoint they wanted me to go through that kind of talks about what’s in a powerhouse, so I understand what I’m doing. But there was also the Solid Edge tutorials. I got a tour of the machine shop that’s there. There’s also a hydraulics laboratory and getting tours of those was part of my orientation. That was, eight hours it was the first day, get your ID, do the basic stuff.

Eight weeks or eight days was the tutorials that really get you started. Then the eight weeks was the go online and look at these supplemental materials. It was up to me to do that. My supervisor, I don’t really talk to my supervisor that much. He’s very helpful. He sets me up, if I have questions, he tells me where to go. But the internship is very self-driven. I set up my trainings, I set up my projects, and I talk to the people I need to talk to. Unless I need him for something or he needs me for something, which is not a lot, I just kind of go on and do what I’m doing how I want to do it.

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Josh’s Quotes #17

[16-24] Early on in the internship, I ended up getting sick and I had to go home. I ended up being out for a week with flu like symptoms. Then, I came back to work and I started to pick up and it was easier to do what I needed to do. Then, my grandmother passed away, which was a minor setback in the work place. I had to leave for a day to come home and take care of that. Then once I got back to work, I didn’t really have anything else going on. That learning curve was also starting to, like I said, level out. Work started to get easier and I started to enjoy it a lot more of the time. Not to say I didn’t enjoy it before, but it definitely, like I said, at points was frustrating. Then as the job got easier, I enjoyed it more.

[191-207] The learning curve began to level out because I kind of figuring out little tips and tricks. Just doing it, taught me how to do it. I don’t want to say I was very quick to go ask for help. Because I would look at a problem and I would try to fix it myself before I would ask and bother someone else and waste their time. But my mentors and co-workers were always there to help me when I needed it. If not right away, within 15, 20 minutes. I leaned on them, they came and helped me. Every time something went wrong, I’d fix it and then maybe a few days later I’d get the same problem and I’d be like, “I remember how to fix this now.” Everything started coming together.

It came together for me in two ways. The first way is that, obviously you have a powerhouse. I’m sure you can imagine there’re hundreds, thousands if not millions of components in that structure. There are a lot of parts to learn. As I’m learning more parts of the powerhouse, and I’m understanding the parts, it makes it easier for me to design it because I know what I’m looking for at the end. That came together, but also learning how to use the systems where we store drawings. Learning how to make a bill of materials. As I started to see how the systems integrated into each other, I was like, “Okay, because I’m putting this in this system, then it can show up here so that this department can know that they have to do X, Y, and Z.” It was all of those things kind of together and not one really outweighed the other. They all kind of just kind of worked at the same pace to get me to the point where I was.

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Josh’s Quotes #18

[67-77] Another aspect where I had to adjust to while working at the company was the 3D modeling software. At school, for reference, the 3D modeling software that we use is called SolidWorks. This company uses Solid Edge. It’s the same concept, different application, different buttons, pretty much how everything else is on a computer. But at first I had to learn that, which was not that difficult. But as I had mentioned before, the difficulty kind of came when I had to learn all of their specific systems. In the sense that, they have a system where they store all of their finalized drawings. I had to learn how to go in there, how to make a drawing and there are certain steps. You have to have certain things set right when you create the document. It has to be a certain type of document. Once you’re done with it, you have to make sure it has a certain name based on what it is for what project. Then you have to promote it to somebody. Then once they approve it, then someone else has to approve it. Then you have to, I think, release it one more time. There was a lot there.

[78-87] Then there was another program called SAP, which is kind of where all the intricate things came in. If you have a drawing with something that you build, you have all of these individual components that go into it. SAP is where you store all of the bill of materials for these components. Again, you have to make a bill of materials, you have to fill in certain things. They have certain call-outs for specific parts. Whether it’s because it’s like a bolt or a nut, or it’s because it’s in a certain part of the powerhouse. Learning all those short names, learning the process so I don’t mess it up or so that there’s less to fix later. Then the same as the other thing, someone else has to check it. I have to update it and then release it and go through all those steps. Learning those systems I think was the most difficult aspect of the internship. I did end up having difficulties with Solid Edge. But it wasn’t necessarily with learning Solid Edge itself, I think it was more so the specific project I was working on.

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Josh’s Quotes #19

[88-100] I think I had difficulty with Solid Edge because it was probably the biggest project I think I’ve worked on in my time. I was given a drawing that was made in 2000 of what’s called a discharge ring. It’s a roughly 140-inch diameter ring that goes out at the bottom of the turbine as the water is discharged, hence the name. I had to model the whole thing. Without getting too intricate, the way it was modeled has to follow a guideline by the company. Of course, this is in an effort to make it more standardized and make it easier for people to look back on what was done moving forward. Because I had to do it a certain way, it took a little longer. Then, when there were issues, I would have to lean on my co-workers to help me.

The company actually assigned me a mentor. I meet with him weekly to discuss anything I’m working on, any questions I have. He usually tells me a few things just in general about powerhouses. He’s like, “I remembered this thing that happened, and I wanted to share it with you.” I can go to him anytime.Then, we also have certain people in the office who are, it’s called key users. One of my co-workers was the key user for Solid Edge. He was the person who taught me how to use it, led me to the tutorials that I had to complete. Then when I had questions, he was most of the time, the person I went to.

[134-157] I should clarify, the discharge ring […] When I say design project, I mean in the sense that I have creative input into how it is designed. With the discharge ring, I was given a drawing and they said, “It’s got to be the same, so make it.” Then I had to use the existing drawing to make a drawing with the right dimensions. But with the design project, one of the types of turbines has blades that can rotate. Inside the hub of the blades there are links that move with the motor to cause the rotation. In assemblies, these links themselves can weigh about 200 pounds. The problem becomes, what you have to do is you have the shaft that the blade is on and then you have a shaft that you have to connect the links with. Basically, you put the pin through the links and then you have to set the links somewhere so that you can put the next pin through. Because they’re obviously pretty heavy, you can’t just hold them with your hand. We don’t want to let them just rest on the parts because they could cause damage and it’s a very tight tolerance. What we need is something that can hold the links up. What was already in process was the design for what they call the link holder. Where it takes two holes that bolt in on the outside of the hub. Then, it’s basically shaped like an L and you have a stud of sorts coming out of it to […] It’s just a screw, a soft screw so that it doesn’t maybe dent the metal on the link, and then the link just sits on it. I mean, I can talk about it more. There’s a lot more to it. But basically, I was given the design that we had, I was given a list of concerns and what to do about them. I was given also some specific things like, “We need this to be changed to this.” Then I came up with some ideas on how to change it.

After talking to my co-worker who gave me the project and then going to his supervisor who the project is for, they both liked the idea and they said I could roll with it. Along the way, they helped me with the actual modeling and figuring out how I could make what I wanted to make, and giving me tips. If I have my design, they said, “Well, we really liked this design. Here’s something that we’d like you to roll with, with your design and tell us how it turns out.”

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Josh’s Quotes #20

[162-182] Unfortunately, we were getting towards the final stages of modeling right when I had to go home because of COVID-19. Basically, what we had done is, I want to say, counting from the first design I was given, I think there were probably one, two, three, maybe four more designs before we landed on the final design. Some of them were my designs, some of them were my co-workers design. But a lot of it was, we sat down together, and we said, “Would this be a good idea? Yes or no, maybe. Let’s try it.”

I made what’s called an involute profile, which is usually the profile of a gear tooth. To do that, it takes some complicated geometry and it’s not something that I could do by hand, it’s not something you can calculate. It took us a while to figure out how to do this because we were basically designing a gear from scratch. A lot of complex curves and faces and we weren’t really sure where to go. It took about two or three weeks to get that figured out. I should add, this wasn’t a priority project, so it didn’t get a lot of time. I had a lot of projects they were giving me and said, “We need this this week.” This is what’s called modularization, so it’s desired to make our lives easier. But after the design, like I said, we were coming close to finishing the modeling. We had figured out, “All right, this model is good. Everything should work the way we wanted it to. Let’s double check a few things and then we can start putting it on a drawing.”

Then once we have a drawing, we send it out to a company that’s going manufacture it for us and send it right to us. Like I said, unfortunately we didn’t get to actually finish it. But the co-worker that I was working with it on, I’m close to and he did tell me, we had a conversation before I left and I told him, I said, “If you guys figure out what you need here and you’re going to finish it, just do it. Don’t wait for me because I don’t know when I’ll be back.” But they did express their thanks with the project. It felt like my input was appreciated and my time.

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Josh’s Quotes #21

[468-495] For the most part, I had positive experiences with the people at work. However, I also worked with an individual who wasn’t as helpful as others. For the discharge ring, I worked with, not a lead engineer, but I think he’s an engineer too. But he’s a lot older than me. He’s probably in his late 50s. He might even be 60. I’m not sure. But that’s very different than talking to my mentor who’s five years older than me. There are times when I was doing that, like when I was modeling this discharge ring, I kept running into problems because I didn’t know the software. I wasn’t sure if I was doing this math right or something, and I would go to him. Sometimes I’d go to him and most of the time he’d be like, “Just do this and that.” It was very easy said and done. But sometimes I would say something and he’s like, “It’s pretty simple. You just got to figure it out.” It was times like that where I got frustrated because I’m like, “Well, I’m kind of asking for help. I don’t think I’d ask if I didn’t need it. It’s obviously not that simple.” But that’s one thing. Like I said, that wasn’t all the time. It was just sometimes.

But then I did have interactions with my mentor. There were a lot of other people that were around that age that were hired around the same time. When talking to them, it’s a lot more nonchalant. They sit down and they want to have a conversation with me as well as do the work or tell me what I need to do. We have Skype for Business in the office. I can send them a message or I can walk to their desk or I can send them an email. But I mean, sometimes we have a conversation on Skype. I might text them and be like, “How do I do this?” They’ll tell me and then they’ll say something and maybe I’ll make a joke and we’ll have a back and forth while we’re working. I don’t know. But it varied a lot. I had both ends of the spectrum. I had, “You’re a kid. I’m an adult. Let’s be sure that you’re the intern here.” Not in a sense I felt like, “Man, I got to get out of here.” Just I was like, “All right, you just got to stick up your butt and I’m just going to do my job anyway.” But I had that end and I had the end of the spectrum where the people were willing to be patient and learn with me.

There were some things where we had a problem and I was able to figure it out. Or I found something in Solid Edge for example. There was a shortcut button. I don’t remember what it did, but I found it and I started using it. The keys user for Solid Edge was like, “I didn’t even know you could do that.” He’s like, “That’s really interesting.” He’s like, “I’m going to remember that.” A lot of spectrums, I guess, crossed in the interactions with my co-workers.

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