This week’s featured student is Sidney Barry, a materials science and engineering major from Brentwood, Tennessee. Barry worked as a co-op student with Flint Group in Asheville, North Carolina.
He mainly worked in the technology department as a development engineer. He was able to lead a few projects related to quality improvement. One of the projects he got to oversee was the production trials with adjusted formulations to find a correlation between the downward shift in compressibility and a corresponding shift in microsphere density, a constituent of the blankets compressible profiles and viscosity.
One of the challenges while on co-op were that many of the projects were observational than hands on, so he had to familiarize himself with the different processes. A valuable benefit was being able to use statistics to look for variations and patterns in raw data, rather than using basic tools to find them.