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