This week’s featured student is Jillian Schwendeman, a biomedical engineering major from Marietta, Ohio. Schwendeman has worked two coop rotations with ChoiceSpine. She worked in the Engineering Research and Design department.
The engineers assigned Schwendeman different tasks as they needed to get projects done. She helped a lot with editing and creating drawings for their parts. Her knowledge of the SolidWorks program is very strong at this point and she used it about 80% of the time for everything she was assigned. She was also given design tasks for improving certain instruments. At times it was challenging for her to complete the design tasks that she was given and since she didn’t have much experience it was difficult to fulfill the expectations that the engineers wanted.
Schwendeman learned to ask a lot of questions and to ask others for their input or ideas. Collaboration is a very important aspect for engineering related work. The experience has taught her how to work in a professional setting and was able to gain a lot of experience with not only engineering, but communication and responsibility in the workplace.