As you may recall from your STEP Signature Project Proposal, your project was designed to foster transformational learning—that is, learning that challenged you personally and helped you gain broader and deeper understandings of yourself, others, and the world around you. Please address the following prompts to help you reflect on your experiences following the completion of your STEP Signature Project; please give careful and critical thought to your responses.
1.Please provide a brief description of your STEP Signature Project. Write two or three sentences describing the main activities your STEP Signature Project entailed.
– I was entrusted to take the initiative and find areas of cost reduction as well as possible opportunities for improvement in new processes. The engineers at my internship also fostered a great learning environment for practical manufacturing at a large scale. I worked with many massive customers such as Honda, Volvo and GM in product feedback and quality control, but I was also responsible for talking to the local contractors in charge of installing machines for the processes.
2.What about your understanding of yourself, your assumptions, or your view of the world changed/transformed while completing your STEP Signature Project? Write one or two paragraphs to describe the change or transformation that took place.
– Realizing that not everyone in the industry is very practical and there are a lot of people who just sit at their desk not really doing anything. Some people will get paid 6 figures to sit at their desk and sports bet. The engineers I personally enjoyed working with had a disdain for this kind of employee, as do I, since I essentially had to do the work of some of these employees even though on paper, they outranked me significantly. Working with the hard-working engineers did give me some hope for the field because despite the scale of manufacturing RDC Inc is not a very large company and I hope that larger companies do not have this as an issue as I am looking to grow as an engineer and the only way to do that will be to work with intelligent and hardworking people.
3.What events, interactions, relationships, or activities during your STEP Signature Project led to the change/transformation that you discussed in #2, and how did those affect you? Write three or four paragraphs describing the key aspects of your experiences completing your STEP Signature Project that led to this change/transformation.
– I worked on cost reduction projects with an engineer named Josh Hall. Josh was an ex-military machinist who worked his way to the position of engineer. He was one of the most practical and down to earth people I met in my time in Shelbyville IN, where Ryobi Die Cast Inc is located. He taught me a lot about machining and process engineering. We worked on the cost reduction projects together and he displayed a level of professionalism that none of my other colleagues shared. Together we saved the company around $536000. Despite being overlooked in meetings and basically silenced by upper management he would still come to work with pride in what he did.
We worked closely with the machine operators and factory workers asking what could and would make their lives easier. Implementing some of their suggestions led to an increase in worker satisfaction in Plant 6 despite issues of high turnover throughout the plants. We listened to these workers who were working 12-hour days, sometimes for months in a row. Both Josh and I have worked at the lowest levels of manufacturing, and we are aware of a lot of the failures of engineers in the consideration of worker health and safety. I worry that almost nothing I have learned in college has led to me being more proficient in an actual engineering role.
I did get the chance to work with contractors to automate strenuous tasks that operators were complaining about. However, despite Josh and my best efforts we were unable to get a simple budget of $100000 approved for the automation, despite saving the company 5x that amount. This automation would have saved the company almost 3x that amount over the next 10 years as well, but it could not make it through upper management. In my time there were 4 other engineers that would attend the meetings that Josh was not involved in. I would sit in these meetings, and everything they said was either Josh’s idea or something that they would later ask Josh to do. I realize that a lot of these people only care about optics and not genuine quality or achievement.
4.Why is this change/transformation significant or valuable for your life? Write one or two paragraphs discussing why this change or development matters and/or relates to your academic, personal, and/or professional goals and future.
-I have realized that no matter where I work, I would like to reduce the stress and labor required by most factories, I would like to work for an automation/integration business in the future so that robots can do all the difficult tasks that will slowly wear down a human being’s willingness to live. I met some people that had been working in the factory with their family for generations and it seemed that people in that small town did not really have that many options outside of Ryobi. I knew a father and son who worked night shift for almost two months in a row and did not really have much time to do anything other than work. I am from a large manufacturing area and this situation is sadly extremely commonplace. Working on making these peoples lives easier is now my life long goal.
