Our student this week is Chelsea Thompson, at right, a civil engineering major who accepted a co-op at Duke Energy located in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Thompson describes the department she worked in and what her main responsibilities were.
“I worked in Transmission Line Engineering,” she said. “This group is in charge of designing new transmission lines as well as maintaining existing lines. I did a lot of O&M projects with lines that needed to gain more clearance from the ground or another object. Also, this group works with developers who are planning to build near a line. For all of the asset protection problems, their grading plans were analyzed to make sure they were not breaking any of our specific guidelines to building near a tower or pole. My last project that I worked on all semester was to model a tower that is used to turn angles in PLS-Tower. To do this, the original drawings of the tower were used to input all of the information into the software, as well as determine the factors that would cause the tower to fail in shear. This program will be used to run reports in the future to determine if a tower can handle a certain load.”
Thompson found the work experience during her co-op assignment to be a valuable benefit.
“Work experience is the most valuable thing I will take away from this co-op,” she said. “I have learned what true engineering is like in the working world. I believe this is something that cannot be taught in a classroom, and I feel lucky to have been able to gain this experience before graduating college.”