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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’s Quotes #10

[75-132] I was off for five days after I came home from school. I started working at my internship. It’s two credits for the internship. I was very excited. It was very fulfilling experience. The company was very good. I was able to achieve a lot of personal goals and spend time with friends on the weekends. I went dinner with my team. My boss was not very good at communication. A lot of times I wouldn’t hear back from her for two months at a time, which is kind of hard to work with when things are time sensitive.

[137-236] I worked at a hundred years old and big company where they make couplings for piping systems. I worked in the regulatory compliance department that only have ten people. Two main projects that I was given was to evaluate a mechanical T, which is a coupling that you can put on an existing pipe to add at a branch. My job was to test them against competitors to prove that ours are superior. The second project was to evaluate some gaskets that are not traditionally used because we want to move into more diverse markets.

A lot of my internship at the beginning was understanding codes and doing research. I was able to plan the tests myself, choose the size and number of products I wanted to use. I confirmed with my supervisor, order, and wait for them. While I was waiting, another project was brought to me. It’s called CE Mark which is almost all electronics. We have these marks on our products since we are a global company. My job was to prepare and organize for an audit. I was there to help ensure that we fix gaps and got to see how the audit works. I continue to replace missing files and waiting for my other parts to come in. Once those parts came in, I was in the shop every day to cut pipe rolling to attach the couplings to pipe and assembling. Over the course of two weeks, I tested 21 assemblies and 15 gasket grains.

I think the internship prepared me to manage time and figure out what’s the best solution. I was not prepared for independence but adapting it. In school, I’m given assignments and was told what to do. Here, I was given problems to figure out how to test by myself. Neither my team leader nor my director of regulatory were there on my first day. I met with the team and started a week early. I met with one person who introduced me to everybody. Most of my interactions were with the team leader. Most days I contacted with him while I need his help. I also work with another person during the audits to go over files. I was trying to learn as we went along. The interactions were limited to my team leader, director of regulatory, and my team. Everyone always interacted with me on a personal level.

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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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Joy’s Quotes #4

[643-660] I remember my cousins husband talking to me about his work when I was little. Sort of pretending that he’s not talking to himself by talking to a two year old so, growing up I was like, “I will literally never understand any of this.” Then coming back from college I’m like, “Oh, I do actually know what you mean when you’re talking about loops and other basic programming things, and just in general the thought process of going through a project from start to finish.”

Also, last summer, I was able to present the solar cell testing system that I created for the satellite. My part on the satellite was the solar cells and testing them for mass production, because the company that I was working for was trying to output 100 satellites that summer. Very small satellites and so I needed to test over 2000 solar cells because there were 20 solar panels per satellite, and my dad told some of his co-workers about what I was doing and they ended up setting up a meeting for me to come in because they wanted to see what I was working on. Which was crazy because, I don’t know, I guess I just always thought of all those people that work in cubicles as, I don’t know, just like they’re very cool and then I get there and they’re laughing, and they’re having fun and I’m like, “Oh, these are real people.”

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Joy’s Quotes #9

[486-490] Also, I was offered a job with the company that I built the satellite with last summer, and they offered me a second internship. I said no because that would’ve been the third summer that I had worked in space and my goal is to go into mechanical with possibly the end goal being biomedical. Maybe get my master’s and become a prosthetist but definitely manufacturing engineering, I love that. I don’t want to build satellites.

[512-515; 522-526] I decided to work for a small company, again, but I think that it will be a good fit. I will be working with the CAD models and helping them do the grunt work on the CAD models and then also working with some of their engineers on prototypes because this is a new developing product. I had a connection from my robotics team when I was in high school. One of the mentors is one of the engineers of this company now. He was just hired and so he recommended me for this job which I knew robotics would pay off, and not just learning how to use a tape measure, but actually having connections that will get me jobs in the future.

[552-555] So I’m, I guess encouraged now that I’m at the end of the second year that I have a job that I’ve lined up, and that it’s something that I think I’m going to enjoy because the other part of it is last semester scared me into thinking, “Not only are you possibly not good enough but you don’t like this at all. This is miserable.”

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Joy’s Quotes #11

[97-103] When I was in high school, I was on a robotics team. One of my mentors from there works at a company that designs vehicles. He remembered me and offered to let me work there as an intern for summer, cause he thought that I would be a good fit. My job involved some designing, as well as working with the assembly technicians to sort of implement the stuff that I was making. It was definitely small-scale designing for me. The company had about 14 employees. So, it was a small company.

[104-110] They make disaster relief vehicles. They weigh between 15 and 50 thousand pounds, depending on which attachments you put on them. The vehicle that I worked on over the summer that we actually shipped out had a 30-ton forklift on the front. Yeah. Sorry. It didn’t weigh 30 tons. It could lift that much weight. It was massive. I have never seen a forklift that big. I didn’t even know that the actual forks themselves were wider than my body. It was very weird and quite tall.

[111-116] Anyway. And it had six German automobile company battery packs. So, those are the size of a twin-sized bed. And so, those go inside. I think those go inside of vehicles that the German automobile company makes, but it’s definitely not the cars, cause a car battery is small. But, anyway, so, that was that. And then, a dump bed and a scissor lift on it. And so, that was sent to the west coast and it helps with their port.

[117-122] But there’s also ones that we’re looking into sending to an orchard that will harvest apples and other things and spread chemicals over whatever the trees they need fertilizers. So, it’s a very diverse purpose for each one of the vehicles. They’re kind of expensive, like a million dollars each. You can buy this vehicle, and then, add attachments.

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Joy’s Quotes #12

[159-164] The first thing that was kind of unique about this experience was that I was the only female in their company. So, at first, they didn’t really know what to do with me, so to speak. For example, I would walk into the room, and they would be talking, and the assembly technicians would be talking, and they would cuss or something, and then, they’re just like, “No, no, no. You can’t do that. Joy’s here.”

[166-170] But, as the summer went on, it was a lot of fun to get to know them. And, because they were between 35 and, I would say, 55, it was a lot of fun to work with them and hear about, I don’t know, their life experience in the different companies that they’d worked at over the years, and just kind of getting the insight into what’s it like to work in a company.

[171-178] Then, another part of that was they were kind of intimidated by the fact that I was in college. And I didn’t understand that, because I looked at them as, “Wow, they’re just full of wisdom, and I have so much to learn from them.” At the beginning of the internship, in addition to when I would walk in, they would just kind of stop talking and be on edge. If I was working in the same room around them and not with them, they would first just say things like, “I wish I was good at math,” or “Guys are supposed to be better at math than women.” And I was like, “What? Why are you trying to purposely talk loud so that I would hear them say these things?”

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joy quotes

Joy’s Quotes #13

[179-189] So, it was a little bit weird at first. But, yeah. I don’t know. I would say, after the first of two weeks, I started working with them as opposed to around them. And so, talking with them while mounting things and asking them for help on, I don’t know, operating machinery that I hadn’t seen before. It was a great teaching experience for them and learning experience for me. They liked the way that I was organized. So, any time something went missing in the shop, they never pointed a finger at me, because I had a reputation of, any time I would get a tool out, I would organize the entire drawer when I put it back. Cause, I mean, all the tools would be everywhere. They joked that they could figure out where I had been, almost like they were detectives, because anywhere there was clean paths, it was because I was there.

[190-195] So, the assembly technicians, it was, honestly, it was just really enjoyable, as opposed to them mentoring me in an engineering sort of way, because I don’t think any of them went to college. It was like they had a high school degree and they’d worked in factories their entire life. And so, that was the kind of experience they were teaching me and telling me about, or their family dynamic, and just that kind of stuff.

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Joy’s Quotes #14

[123-128] Anyway. So, I spent the majority of my summer either working with the assembly technicians, attaching decals and running wiring harnesses. Let’s see. What else? Attaching minor hinges and doors, panels on there. As well as, I designed a forklift control panel. So, all the levers that you would need for the joystick.

[129-136] It was really fun. I was sent the dimensions for men and women from the first percentile to 99th percentile. Then, based on those dimensions, I had to design my system based on the radius that someone’s wrist, both men and women, from, I think fifth percentile to 80th percentile. I think that’s what I had to design it for, from wrist rotation to fingertip, because there were four triggers. So, that was the main project I worked on and it was a success. We put it onto one of our units. And, because each vehicle’s personalized, they probably won’t need it again unless somebody wants a forklift. But, yeah, it was so cool.

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Joy’s Quotes #15

[196-201] When I wasn’t in the shop, I was working with the engineers and the other interns. There were three other interns. Also, the owner of the company also worked in the offices. So, that was really cool. And the founder; he’s the owner and founder. So, that was where I learned a lot about what’s this going to be like to be an engineer later on.

[207-216] So, my supervisor would give me a task. For example, he said, “Make the forklift operating station,” and then, sent me the documents, and then, said, “Email this other person,” who was a project manager, but he has an engineering background,” to get the schematics for the dimensions of human arms, including the radii in which the elbow and wrist rotate.” So, my very first mistake was that I did not clarify. I don’t know if this was a mistake on my part or their part. But I did not clarify what radius they wanted me to make this off of, either the elbow or the wrist. And I assumed it was the elbow. I designed the whole thing in CAD, and even made a prototype, and I give it to them, and he goes, “This is not comfortable.”

[217-224] I was like, “Oh, my goodness. I am in so much trouble.” And I was kind of concerned, cause I’ve never been given a responsibility in any of my internships so far, in which me making a mistake actually impacts people. And so, it was really weird to be the only person on this project. And, basically, until I get it done, I don’t have to report to anyone. But, no, that was very interesting. They weren’t upset with me. They didn’t blame me for that. They were just like, “Yeah, this is a learning experience, and this is why you make prototypes. Also, you’re an intern. You are supposed to be learning.”

[225-236] Then, they went through the process of explaining to me why you’d want the elbow radius versus the wrist radius. Oh, actually, sorry. Reverse that. I made it off of the wrist radius first, and it was supposed to be the elbow. Which means, it was a much tighter radius. It was more arched, as opposed to flat. And so, he explained to me, “On an airplane, you need to have very precise adjustment abilities. And, therefore, you should just be moving your fingers and your wrist. Whereas, if you’re going to be sitting and operating a heavy piece of machinery, like a tractor or a forklift or something like that, for hours on end, you do not want to have to hold your wrist at the perfect angle. It’s more comfortable to just kind of rest your elbow on the chair and hold the trigger down for multiple hours in a row than just running it back and forth.” So, it was really interesting to hear the science behind why you’re making a simple decision like that.

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