CO-OP position...

So I decided since I am going to be a manufacturing engineer, what better way to prepare myself for a job and see if I still want to go to graduate school than to work for a semester. Well, I decided to take a position that one of my professors got me in contact with Flow Controls of Emerson Climate Technologies, a buisness partner of Emerson. Emerson is a large company with many buisness partners, but is best known around St. Louis as Emerson Electric.

Well, I've already started my job on Monday (December 18th) and I think it's great, so far. They have a very good system for CO-OP's. They employ two a year and they make sure to have them overlap by a week each time, so as to have the old co-op train the new one. The guy I am replacing, Tyler, helped me out a TON this week. I already have two very large projects to work on, and when we return from Christmas vacation, I will have a lot on my plate.

At Flow Controls, they place a lot of responsibility on their CO-Ops. They treat us like regular employees and they allow us to use our brains, all the while helping us along so we don't fail. The way it was described to me of a typical day from my boss, Evren: "I will come into your office, give you a problem. I will not know the solution, I will not know who does. That's your job. You are to figure it out, report it, and if it looks good, we'll go with that." The first project I am working on is scoping, purchasing, and implementing 4 brand new machines for our plant in Mexico. These are $15,000 machines a piece, and they are trusting me to make a decision. That's awesome!

Since I was only there for a week, I don't have much more to report than that. I should say that taking the CO-OP was a very hard choice, because it will delay my graduation by another semester. However, I feel that the experience I gain will completely outweight the drawbacks of being in school one more semester. I will continue to update...


Joe

Life at SIUE: What I've learned in 1 semester

This probably could have been broken up into a few different blogs, but I'll try to keep it to the point. The format of this is particularly special, because I'm not talking about equations and such, I'm meaning more about the real life things most of us are concerned about anyway. So here we go in no particular order other than how they pop into my head.

I have learned...

-The greatest way to figure out what you want to do is by narrowing it down to what you don't want to do. When you do it this way, you can take out huge chunks of choices. Chances are, you're never going to be able to pick exactly what you do within a company (as an engineer), so it's better to only look for jobs that you know will not make you do the things you hate. For example, I will not look for a job that makes me use Auto CAD all day long... not my cup of tea.

-Lab reports are stupid. That's right, I hate them. Every professor wants them differently, and if they really wanted to know how to do the lab, why did they hand you the procedure? Say what you will... if I never have to write another report I will die a happy man. And yes, I know that's impossible...

-Group projects require more individual work than individual projects. Seems odd to me too... but it's true. One of the biggest difference between SIUE and IC i have found are the group/final projects. Yes, at IC, we turned every homework assignment into a group project, but that was for comfort sake. At SIUE, 4 out of 5 classes I had assigned final group projects (sounds like a Trident commercial, right?). They are often weighted very heavily and require many more hours than they first appear. As usual, I promised myself I would get a head start on my part, and as usual I waited until the very last days to complete them. Oh well, grades came out fine so all is well that ends well...

- I miss IC

- I want to be in quality control when i graduate/go to grad school. As a potential mechanical engineer, I was more wanting to work with quality control, efficiency, lowering costs, all of these type of things, and if you talk to anyone who knows me, they will verify this, i'm sure. Well coming to SIUE, I had the chance to look at the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering program and to my surprise, that fits in perfectly there. You see, even though they are one program, there are two different degrees. Industrial is more related to people. How they work, kinds of output they are giving, where they are located, etc. Mechanical engineering (they kind i wanted to do) was more related to the machines. How the machines worked, better design, better outputs, things of this sort. Well Manufacturing Engineering is the combination of the two. It deals with the over all setup of people and machines and over all outputs and such. It turns out I love this kind of stuff...

-The egg obviously came first. Well I guess I didn't learn that here, but still. What are the odds that a bird just appeared? Exactly. Now what are the odds that two different animals met, fell in love, and had a lovely little egg? See my point?

- Always, ALWAYS make sure when you are walking around up there in J-ville, you stop to realize how lucky and fortunate you are to have the kind of experience you are having or about to have. It's the greatest experience of my life and I'm sure the most valuable one too...

Until next time my friends,

Joe

Wow, it sure has been a while!

Ok ok ok... i know i know i know... some of you might be wondering "ok mr. joe, what happened to every week???" The quick answer: I got busy. The more accurate answer: I drastically underestimated the time I would be spending doing everything that was required of me. But at last, some time to update, fill in the blanks, and all of that good stuff.

For future reference, if it has taken me a while to update, and you seriously need some information, just email me. I promise i reply to those faster than I post. Also, I will be posting a few different blogs to catch up, so i do not have to post it all at once and the information is a bit more organized.

First thing first: I am finished!!!

That's right, my first semester at SIUE has come to an abrupt end, and I have mixed feelings about it. All in all, however, I had a very good time and I learned a great deal more than I anticipated. I have "sorta" narrowed my career path, gained some valuable experience, and decided to skip out on next semester...

Yep, that's right, no school for me next semester! I am going to be doing a CO-OP with a manufacturing company in St. Louis. More on this in the next blog.

So the order of the next few blogs will be:

Life at SIUE
CO-OP position
Classes to take

Read on, enjoy, comment, laugh, cry, you know... you know.

Signing off...

Joe