My name is Leah Wofford, and I am from Albuquerque, NM. I started school at Eastern New Mexico University as a music major, and realized after 2 semesters that I missed math classes dearly. I transferred to New Mexico State University and began taking math classes without knowing yet why. I enjoyed all of my applied math classes but when it came to theoretical math I started to realize my heart was in application and engineering. I took an introduction to engineering course, and when the department head of the Chemical Engineering program came to speak to our class about the department of CHME, I was immediately hooked. I had been completely unsure of my future until that day, but in the chemical engineering department I found a home. When I started this internship I had just completed my sophomore year which was marked by the completion of CHME 305: Transport Operations I: Fluid Flow.
In spring 2017 I accepted a systems engineering internship with Raytheon Company to be completed from May through August 2017. The objectives of the internship were to accomplish software runtime testing, present the runtime testing results to management, and to work through a backlog of software integration testing requests. I first finished all of the software integration test requests. This involved first getting comfortable with the software that my internship would revolve around. The software in question was modeling and simulation software. Once I was comfortable running the software and understanding its normal conditions I was able to perform integration testing. This involved making sure that any recent changes to the software (mostly bug fixes) performed properly and did not negatively affect any other aspects of the software’s performance.
Next I started on the runtime performance analysis project. I set up to run the software in question on two different machines and ran them under scenarios of varying stress. The point of this was to explore and quantify the benefit of running the software on a computer equipped with a graphics processing unit versus a central processing unit. I put together the results and presented them to management and coworkers to great excitement over the potential of the graphics processing unit for runtime reducing capability with this software. I was then asked to use a Matlab script to automate the data analysis that I performed so that the test could be repeated as many times as desire and quickly parsed for the desired data. This was very challenging and exciting. My Matlab experience from CHME 392-Data Analysis was essential to my ability to complete this project.
My chemical engineering education prepared me for these tasks by teaching me the essentials of physics and computer science, and by expanding my critical thinking and problem solving skills. This job, as a systems engineering position, was not directed towards someone with a chemical engineering degree, but with the skills I gained in chemical engineering and my success in this seemingly unrelated field I now see that chemical engineering has prepared me for nearly any career requiring an engineering or science degree.
The internship was not in a manufacturing or chemical plant, I was working on software, so safety in the workplace was very simple, and consisted mostly of ensuring I was following company protocols for protecting information.
The internship involved making multiple presentations regarding the results of the software runtime testing, and also about the overall success of tasks I accomplished throughout the internship. These presentations demanded that I use my best communication skills as they would be my sole contact with upper management, who would have no other way of judging my worth as an employee. Communication skills were also essential to accomplishing everyday tasks. As a new employee there are always things to be learned, I had to work with many people to learn things essential to my job, and I had to be able to ask the right questions and understand the answers. The group experiences that I get every day in the chemical engineering curriculum prepared me for this through encouraging me to communicate things that I understand in my head but that are sometimes difficult to communicate out loud.