Southern Summer at Solenis
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Date
2018-11-01
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Being an engineering student, jobs are extremely competitive, especially for second-year students seeking their first internship. It all comes down to which company is going to take a chance on you. I have decided that I am interested in the polymer or food industries for chemical engineering but am unsure of which best suits me. My STEP project of an engineering internship will help me gain real-world experience that I can use throughout the rest of my college career and in my future jobs.
When I was in Austin, Texas in October for the Society of Women Engineers Conference, I interviewed with Solenis for an internship position with their Pulp & Paper section of the company. The woman I interviewed with found my college involvement and projects fascinating and thought I would be a great fit at her branch in Canton, North Carolina. A week later, they offered me the position as a Technical Sales Intern at the Canton branch with the woman I interviewed with as my mentor for the summer. This was one of the best phone calls I had received my entire life. Not only were they willing to be the first engineering company that I would work for, but they also offered me an internship for the summer, which is an extremely competitive season for engineering internships. Their offer also would keep me on track to graduate in four years, which has been my goal since my first day of college.
Starting in the beginning of May 2018 and ending mid-August 2018, I will be working for Solenis with people I have never met before and living in a place I have never visited. Throughout my internship, I will work with people with diverse backgrounds and various job titles. I will build a network of professionals who can introduce me to successful engineers and other company representatives, give me advice about engineering, write recommendation letters for me, and, provided I am successful at my internship, give me a job after graduation. I will also be able to use my experiences from this internship in interviews with engineering recruiters from other companies to show how I was able to apply my engineering knowledge to improve the company’s success.
One of the parts of my internship that I am most looking forward to is the position that I will be filling as a Technical Sales Intern. Through research and laboratory work in my classes, I have learned that I not only enjoy experimenting with new reactions and designing new products, but I also don’t want to be stuck in a lab all day at my future job. I want to be out in the field discussing my fellow engineers and I’s products with our consumers and being able to travel to see how much my company is impacting the world. The job of a technical sales professional is just this, getting to create a product while also managing the company’s accounts and interacting with the consumer to determine how the company’s product can be improved to meet their needs.
My internship will also allow me to apply my new knowledge about mass and energy balances and general chemical engineering information to real-world experiences with an engineering company. I will work with a mentor on projects that include analyzing and testing the company’s products, selling them to the plant’s customers, and managing the company’s accounts. Besides learning about engineering, I will also learn about the business side of the company through dealing with Solenis’ accounts and sales. This will show me how any product needs to be marketed and sold well enough to bring in profit for the company.
Throughout this past semester as I decided on my STEP proposal objective, I attended the Interview Strategies Professional Development Co-Curriculars to prepare for any interviews I will have in the future with companies. I was able to use the information I learned at this session in my interview with Solenis to thoroughly express my interest in their company and clearly answer their questions about my involvement in and out of the classroom. After receiving the internship offer for the summer, I finally decided that I wanted to focus my STEP project on my engineering internship.
After receiving the internship, the next step was to determine where I would live for the summer in Asheville, North Carolina. The woman who will be my mentor for the summer, Amber Doty, has been extremely helpful in this process. I have emailed her questions and asked for advice on the best and cheapest places to live in Asheville. She has provided me with an endless amount of resources, from giving me Facebook pages to check for available apartments to helping me find college students nearby who are planning to sub-let their apartment for the summer, since the University of North Carolina at Asheville will be in the same area where I will be living. My STEP mentor has also helped me stay on track and determine which details I need to write my proposal and when I should have them collected. He has given me tips on how to structure my proposal and resources I can utilize to ensure that my STEP objective is the right one for me.
Being in North Carolina at Solenis this summer and living by myself so far away from home will help me grow as an individual to become more independent and will give me the confidence about being completely on my own after graduation. My first experience working for an engineering company will be challenging, especially because my position is something that I never knew existed until about five months ago. However, I am confident that these challenges will bring out the best version of myself. This internship will be a pivotal moment in my career as a student and as an engineer as I am forced out of my comfort zone and into the next steps of becoming an adult that could change the course of the rest of my life.
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STEP Category: Internships