During the summer I continued my work in the Hydraulic Systems group. My assignments were different from the previous year as I was focused more on design review of all hydraulic systems on the COLUMBIA Class submarine. In my reviews I found mistakes ranging from simple fixes to more complex issues. For every one, I worked in tandem with the cognisant engineers for the respective system to determine the best way to rectify the problem. Another large assignment was an End-to-End intern exchange that was done between all of the systems engineering interns across four of Electric Boat's locations. This entailed us interns scheduling meetings to plan a tour of our location and a presentation of what we do. My responsibilities, outside of the general team member ones, included leading a tour group, presenting on the details and complexity of design (using a 4-way hydraulic valve as an example), and technical review of other team member slides. Given that it was my third internship with Electric Boat, and second with the COLUMBIA Hydraulics Systems group, I was treated as an Engineer I and trusted as such with the assignments I was given.

During my second internship with Electric Boat, I switched groups to work on the COLUMBIA Class submarine Hydraulics Systems. Here I was given many important tasks including creating a process map for completing shock qualification of submarine military and commercial components, training coworkers in methods of component shock qualification per military specifications, performing shock qualifications, arranging hydraulic piping systems in submarine spaces with multi-disciplinary teams, writing responses to vendor information requests for component procurement, and reviewing hydraulic system 3D models and 2D construction drawings for compliance with customer requirements. These assignments allowed me to develop my skills with technical presentations, design of fluids systems, knowledge of fluid system components, mentoring coworkers, CAD model manipulation, and professional communication.

I was a part of the Reliability, Availability, & Maintainability group in General Dynamics Electric Boat for 8 weeks. There I had the opportunity to learn about our more about our Navy’s submarines and their importance to our National Security. The assignments I was given ranged from designing the flowchart of a program to automate a tedious process, testing that program process manually, giving a solo 45 min technical presentation on the process to my group and supervision, as well as Failure Mode Classification (FMC) of failure reports. The highlight of my time there was the program development as I got to implement excel and programming skills & knowledge I had learned in my freshman classes at Purdue. It was mainly a highlight however because I got to see my hard work pay off and gave my best presentation ever, in a real situation too. In learning to do the FMC, I found the current FMC decision flowchart to be unclear and not correct in some cases based off discussions with the engineers I was working with. I therefore took it upon myself to develop a brand new flowchart that would be much clearer and without errors, keeping well in mind that any future interns or new hires would be able to use it with little to no guidance from busy engineers. The new flowchart was praised by my coworkers and was implemented in a letter to the Navy just a couple weeks after I had left for the summer. I returned to Electric Boat for the Summer 2022 internship in the hydraulics group, but I stopped by my old group and was excited to see the program I worked so hard on being used.