The featured student this week is Jessica Ossyra, a Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering major from Knoxville, Tennessee, who worked for SI Group in Newport, TN.
During her internship, Ossyra worked as a production engineering intern at a chemical plant, where her tasks pertained to process improvement, safety, and daily operations. Some of her daily tasks included utilizing API Standard equations to size pressure blanketing regulators for various tanks and make recommendations for purchasing, as well as analyzing the storage footprint of product material to make a recommendation for increased storage capacity in two warehouses.
Ossyra learned new technical skills on the job, as well. Including reading P&ID drawings, creating isometric piping drawing, field verification of isometrics, tracing lines through the plant, identifying different types of equipment in the field, reading a DCS monitor, and retrieving data from PI System software.
When describing the benefits of her co-op, Ossyra says, “The most valuable part of this internship was to actually be in a chemical manufacturing plant and see what engineers actually do on a daily basis. Seeing the equipment in real life, taking it apart, putting it back together, and understanding how it works really helps to put the calculations and theory into perspective. It becomes real.”