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josh quotes

Josh’s Quotes #9

(230; 501-502; 506) So I still don’t have a co-op. I actually have an interview today at 1:30, a phone interview at 1:30. I didn’t include it on the journey map, I forgot to. But part of that last up curve I’d say was procuring the phone interview I have today. Slightly nervous, very confident.

(259-262; 264-267) So with this one, this company that I am interviewing with today, they design and manufacture pipe fittings. And my dad was a sprinkler fitter for 35 years. And when I told him that I applied at this company, that they want to interview me, he said that he worked with their products. So that’s one thing that I will plan to be using as an “in” into the company, to say hey, I know your products are good, I have primary source knowledge of this, and I want to be a part of that process.

(106-111) I definitely am not ready to go into the workforce as an engineer. I would say I’m getting closer. This summer I’ll be going through my first co-op internship. So I think once that happens I’ll feel a lot closer because I’ll start to get work experience in. I feel very confident in my problem solving skills and my ability to work on a team. So in that sense of an engineer, I feel very confident.

(476-480) I was not very involved before I came to college. I never considered myself a leader. I considered myself a follower. But since I’ve come to school I think I’ve developed the leadership and communication skills necessary, not only to succeed in my field, but also to move forward in life and be able to interact with the people I meet in my daily life and in my professional life in a way that we can collaborate efficiently and cohesively.

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josh quotes

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 quotes

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 #24

[396-421] Although I had an internship this semester, I originally planned to participate in student senate, but I found out that my work schedule would put me coming home right when the meetings were starting every week. I have a position that needs to be there at least 30 to 45 minutes before the meeting. I decided to step down because I could’ve made it work. I could have asked my friends to cover for me and they offered to cover for me before I even asked them. But I felt that the position should be given to somebody who has the time to put in, because they’re going to be more passionate and they’re going to be a better asset to the team.

Even though I didn’t do that though, I still know everyone in the organization pretty much. I’ve gone to a few of their events. I showed up to their meeting one day when I got off of work a little early and I stayed in touch with them. But they are also kind of in cooperation with our campus activities board. I have continued my involvement with them. I still do their … You have to work an event every month. Which isn’t a problem because I usually do the trivia night, which is Friday, around 8:00. It’s way after work, I can still do what I need to do and then enjoy my evening. I did that. I’m trying to think if there was anything else. I mean, I still talk to the alumni department. I’m not part of that organization anymore, but I still support it, I guess as a third party. If that’s the correct way to phrase it.

I mentioned in one interview that I was a part of a thing called road crew. I wasn’t in that this year because I had my internship and I had to be available for that. But their last stop was in downtown near the school where I was living and it was right when everybody came back to school. I went there and I was able to talk to all my friends and support the organization and support my school. We have what’s called the Day of Giving. Where it’s how the college makes its money because our college is not for profit. I participated in that by donating some money, which is typically something that they ask people who are in the organization or have been in the organization. I donated and did a few other things. I showed up to an event across campus one day just to support them and say, “I’m here.” I have even begun talking to them about coming back to the organization next year when I have more time. I don’t think there’s anything else though. I think those are the only things that I’ve been able to maintain with the time that I had leftover in my day.

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Josh’s Quotes #26

[448-462] I don’t really talk that much to other students just because a lot of them aren’t on campus. But my roommate’s an engineer. We talk about work, but we don’t really necessarily talk about what we do. We talk more about the social interactions that we’re having. In my opinion, it seems like he’s not doing the level of work that I would expect from an internship given the experiences I’ve had. It kind of just seems like busy work to me sometimes, not all the time. We talk about that. We talk about what we’re doing and we’re like, “This is stupid.” Or, “This is fun.” Then I do have a few other friends. Like the student that I’m going to be living with this coming year, I’ve talked to him every now and then. He messaged me the other week and he was freaking out. He’s like, “Oh my God.” He’s like, “I designed this part and I ordered this tubing, but I thought it was this tubing.” He’s like, “I got really lucky because it was still correct.” It was a long conversation I’m trying to just shove into a few seconds. But he tells me about his projects. He tells me what he’s working on. He asked me what I’m doing, and we also talk about the coming summer and the coming fall. We had to figure out our roommate situation and all that. But that pretty much I’d say it would describe most of the interaction with my peers. Other than the day to day, I see them walking to the gym or at the dining hall.

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joy quotes

Joy’s Quotes #22

[580-581; 495-504] Overall, this year has been really great in my journey to becoming an engineer. I guess, just not being bothered by grades, and putting more of my identity in, I don’t know, just being confident in myself, and not putting my identity in my grades. That was the big thing. I’m like, “I am done putting my identity in my grades and I’m focusing more on myself and the relationships I have with people in my life who’ve influenced me to be better.”

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lauren quotes

Lauren’s Quotes #2

[196; 200-204] I really enjoyed the projects second year of college. My programming class involved two projects. One of them was programming a Roomba to work on Mars. I trained it to walk behind me and it could play tag. My partner and I really enjoyed working on that project. The other one was working with microcontrollers, specifically Arduino. For both projects, I was partnered with someone I had never met before. We had a lot of time to work on the project and we got dinner once together because it was dinner time while we were working on the project. We clicked and we were good friends.

[227-229; 233-239] During my third semester, one of the professors reached out to me and was like, “Hey, you were a really cool student” and asked if I would want to come work in his lab. He works with magnetic nanoparticles. I am responsible for developing simulations so that we can see if we can figure out what skyrmions look like on the inside. They are like magnetic materials that are circles and they’ve got weird shape on the inside.

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Lauren’s Quotes #8

[82-87; 112-118] This summer I spent a lot of time in a state in the mid-Atlantic during my internship. The internship was at a national research laboratory. It was a 12-week program where you go and you mentor underneath one of the researchers there. You work on one project over the summer. Because of my placement, I got to shoot neutron rays at these samples and see what happened to them. I got to analyze that, and it was really awesome and really cool. The people I worked were also amazing.

[163-169] Originally when I went in, I was scared of everyone including my mentor over the summer, even though I had previously talked with him. But I had never seen him face-to-face. I was like, “Oh, my god. These people are so smart and I’m going to say something dumb and they’re going to kick me out.” I mean they wouldn’t kick me out, but you get sort of terrified of that when you go into a situation like that in my opinion. But even if I asked the same question three times, they always explained it to me, which was really comforting.

[170-175] But just watching them be able to do their work, it was amazing. Even if I was helping out, it was crazy seeing how much more they could do. Originally I thought I wanted to go into industry, but just seeing how cool all of the research is, even not just this project I was on, but the projects my friends were working on, and the other projects my mentor was working on, it was amazing hearing everything about it. Just like they were all so smart and it was amazing.

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Lauren’s Quotes #9

[522-530] My internship was also mostly scary because one, I had never been to the state before. Two, I didn’t have my car, so I walked to work and eventually got a ride from one of my coworkers. I was scared that they would look down on me, too. Sometimes, I don’t often have a country accent, but sometimes I have a Southern accent. At one point someone pointed out that I say “iron” weird. I-R-O-N. I was also sort of scared that they would see me as dumb just because sometimes I have a Southern accent because I grew up in the South. I didn’t want to look stupid is basically the whole point. But I was scared. I just didn’t want to be stupid.

[183-192] I’m not a biology person, but half of my peers studied biology or stuff like that. And half of us were assigned to physics-based projects, which is what I was on. Even with talking with the biology-ish people about their projects, we were able to help them out like, “Hey, did you think to do this?” They would put forth good input when we were talking about problems with our projects. I still talk with them even though they’re all over the US now. We’re not together, but we still talk to each other. We have a group chat. Someone the other day posted a picture and was like, “Hey, we did this.” Because they had learned about something we had done in their class.

[197-207] At the laboratory, we all did experiments with neutrons. We all had either reflectometry or SANS, which is Small Angle Neutron Scattering data. There are certain ways that you can look at the data. I was looking at data for magnetism stuff mostly. I had learned some tips or tricks with maybe the small square to get it to show the magnetism data. One of my friends would be like, “Hi, I don’t understand what this is.” And I would be like, “Hey, that looks like the [inaudible 00:16:11] from my data. Let’s click here and see what happens.” Or sometimes it was just like, “Hey, did you think to rotate the sample?” If you hadn’t rotated it and you were wondering why you couldn’t see anything, sometimes it would just be there was a commonsense thing. Just you didn’t think of that approach.

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