I am proud to be a Junior majoring in Chemical Engineering at Penn State University. Through this program I have learned how to design chemical processes as well as the unit operations that allow them to function, such as heat exchanges and distillation columns. I have taken a chemical process safety course. Through this course we looked at a variety of accidents and how they could have been prevented or what went wrong. The idea that safety is a precondition not a mindset was a philosophy heavily emphasized throughout the course. I gained experience outside of classes through my internship at Stockwell Elastomerics, located in Philadelphia PA, during the summer of 2023. Throughout my internship I worked very closely with the production teams to produce a variety of rubber gaskets. During production if the parts weren’t coming out as expected I along with my colleagues would work to determine what the issue is and how to correct it to ensure good quality parts were coming out consistently. Additionally, I was responsible for reviewing purchase orders and noted change notification language for a new machine that had been recently installed. It was necessary to determine whether we could run the orders on the new machine or if there was a clause in the order that prevented it from being run on this machine. The last project I assisted with at the end of my internship was to begin a process control study on one of the post finishing procedures to determine ways to make our system more efficient.