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Originally Posted by Captain Ahab Jr
Really interested to hear of people's experiences of this as a way to fast track interns and graduates pace of learning on the job
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We have a summer intern program at both the companies I am affiliated with - the North Carolina facility for composites is associated with North Car State University, excellent engineering school, and we try and get an intern from every grade that lives in the Morganton area. We also bring on at least one High School person.
They are all really bright kids and a pleasure to work with. We start them off their first summer with us on the composite line doing lay up and the basics of composutes and composite tooling They also clean up at the end of the day.
Since 80% return every summer, we give them gradually more design and CAD work that they can then manufacture.
This has been the overwhelming response: "Working lay up made me a better designer...what looks like a million bucks in CAD may be a huge pain to build unless you get the loft right etc."
On the aero side, the small company in Yorktown, we do two a summer. Generally one looking at a business or finance degree (my intern) and an aero engineer.
The aero person starts out in flight test as a helper, updating test results and test plans, maintenance, etc. If they are good by the end of the first summer they will be piloting the UAS in some regimes.
They love it. Hard to get them off the flight line
They also do janitorial work at the end of the day.
My point being is that the mentor-ships start out gaining an apprciation for how their future designs will be built and by what type of craftsman...they also get a sense of manufacturing "time" and complexity of tooling, critical components of composite manufacturing.
Lastly, we also partner with other universities on really neat projects like solar powered cars, etc. We had a ton of Appalachian State students in three summers ago and built a car shell with them. Very cool stuff.
We also helped Duke U. with some slippery coatings:
I know the manual labor aspect of what we do with starter Interns may sound odd, but having working many years in production environments and helicopter/UAS design management, I think it is critical that young interns get away from the "CAD Machine" and learn the trade from the perspective of the builders and assemblers. We also school them on Kaize and principles and processes and add an additional requirement: "Don't fall in love with your design..."
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