Work Experience:

    While attending Rensselaer I have been fortunate enough to work in some real world setting that have enhanced my knowledge of engineering and the behind the scenes work of engineers.

    During the summers and winter breaks of my freshman and sophomore years I worked at Gould Shawmut, now called Ferraz Shawmut, located in Newburyport, MA.  Gould Shawmut manufactured fuses, fuse holders, and power distribution blocks from the personal CD player scale all the way up to the nuclear power plant scale.  Having auditors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was a normal occurrence.  Not having much practical engineering knowledge yet, or having much book knowledge even during my first summer there, I was assigned to the Documentation Control Department.  This department was responsible for tracking all Engineering Change Orders (ECO's), all CAD drawings, and also for doing any minor changes related only to CAD drawings.  I was responsible mainly for simple CAD drawing changes, database upkeep, and doing the footwork between the engineers and the shop floor workers.  Most of the running around was to obtain signatures for the ECO's, and required I could communicate the changes being proposed in a manner that the person I was dealing with could understand.  Engineers seemed only versed in technical language, and shop floor workers just knew how to read drawings and make their machine make the part in the drawing.  As time went on over my first summer there, I was given the responsibility of fielding database change requests for my supervisor.  He gave me administrative access to the system, and I determined whether or not certain changes could be made directly, or if they required an ECO to change them.  Here again I dealt with a few different breeds of people.  The people on the shop floor didn't care what happened, they just knew the computer was wrong, the people in engineering knew the computer was right and just wanted the workers to make it, and the people in sales just needed to make sure the database was correct so that they could sell the correct parts to our customers.  Communicating between the three of them was difficult at best, but I got accustomed to each groups concerns and could target the problem much quicker as time went on.  My next work terms there, encompassing my second summer and my second winter break, were spent relocating resources from our Newburyport facility to our Montreal and Jaurez, Mexico facilities.  Most of the work involved database integration, and my manager put me in charge of that for the first two phases of the move, encompassing roughly 33% of the overall move.  While I did this, I was also responsible for making database changes and upgrades as necessary, and tracking those throughout the moving process.

    Andover Coated Products manufactures cohesive flexible bandages.  In simpler terms, they manufacture narrow Ace^(TM) bandages that only stick to themselves and require no clips.  They serve the medical, sports, and veterinary markets in the US, Europe, Canada, and a fledgling market in China.  The entire company of roughly 150 employees is housed at their Salisbury, MA facility.  I was hired into a co-op engineering position, just as the engineering manager was promoted to the head of engineering and production.  With his new responsibilities, he required I direct myself according to the bi-weekly review meetings we had.  Working at Andover Coated Products (abbreviated ACP), my engineering knowledge was used to assist the maintenance department in doing long term repairs on machinery, improvements on limited use applications (such as printing on the bandages), and electronics and machinery interface issues.  Over the course of my 8 month term at ACP I developed new methods for liquid cohesive delivery, a new method of cutting the bandage during the rewind stage, and improvements on existing equipment to facilitate better material handling.  Along with my mechanical experiences, I had to draw on my electronics and computer experiences.  Few of the machines were completely mechanical, allowing for problems to be occurring with the electrical and computer interfaces also.  The machine used to wrap the bandages in plastic is a good example of multiple types of problems.  It was possible that gears had come out of alignment, sensors had been unintentionally tripped, or the previous shift's operator had not relayed information about the settings of the machine.  Any of these things could cause the machine to not work, but figuring out what the cause was made the job interesting.  Another project I was given responsibility over was the two Markem^(TM) 5000 box printing machines.  No one still working at the company knew how to operate the machines, and they did not want to wait the week it would take to get a representative out, so I was tasked with learning the machines before lunch, and fixing the databases they held after lunch, all during the same day.  My computer skills came in very hand here since the interface was relatively simple, if you were not afraid to push the buttons.

    During both work experiences, not only were engineering skills necessary, but critical thinking and people skills played an even larger role.  If you couldn't successfully find out from the operator what the issue was, you rarely were diagnosing the correct problem.  At Gould, engineers would only reluctantly speak with operators, since each had a high level of disdain for the other.  At ACP, the managers would often get discouraged since more of the operators were of Hispanic decent and spoke Spanish.  Having taken three years of beginning Spanish, I was at least able to understand what the operators were saying, and through a lot of hand waving, I could usually get my point across to them also.  Once the problem was correctly identified from the operator's point of view, the task became tracing the problem back to find out what was fault with the system.  Oftentimes it was merely a small fix that had to be implemented, or a fuse changed, or a file reloaded, in order to get the machine, and the operator, working again.  Other times the problem required me to get the tools out and physically dissect a system.  The first time I took a wrench to the multi-axial slitting machines, people were biting their nails, but thanks to the critical thinking skills I have learned, I was easily able to find the broken part or sub-system, fix it, and have the machine up and running again.