The featured student this week is Kyle Andersen, a mechanical engineering major from Gallatin, Tennessee, who worked for Borg Warner in Asheville, North Carolina.
During his rotation, Andersen worked in Innovation and New Concepts, which is the part of the Asheville branch that looks years into the future to create prototype machines for anticipated problems. The group is currently working on 3+ projects and several are being sent to possible customers for testing. When the prototype is finished and goes through a few reviews, the prototype goes to Product Development, where they improve upon it and make it easier to manufacture.
Andersen says he find this group the most interesting because it comes up with new machines for problems many others haven’t thought about yet. The group also does all the work to create the prototype machines (more or less). This includes designing through CAD, finding suppliers for parts, physically building the prototypes, balancing and testing them, and shipping them out
When describing the benefits of his co-op, Andersen says, “I have learned quite a lot about an engineering work environment, and have gotten to peer into what my future might be like. This has helped me ask myself more questions about what I want to do with my life much sooner. I feel like I would not have asked myself these questions without having this work experience. I feel this rotation was essential to opening my eyes on what my life might be like, and helped me to start figuring out a route to get where I want to be.”