Our student this week is Mitchell McKinnon, a mechanical engineering major who accepted an Internship at Eastman Chemical Company located in Kingsport, Tennessee for the summer after having completed his co-op assignments with Duke Energy.
McKinnon describes the department he worked in and what his main responsibilities were.
“I worked in a subset of the CM&S (Central Maintenance & Services),” he said. “Specifically I worked with the Reliability department with Polymer development. Most of what I worked on while at Eastman was supportive data collection. There is a shift towards making equipment more reliable and producing a PM schedule that is sensible. Much of the equipment I dealt with either had outdated information with an outdated PM schedule or no schedule at all.”
McKinnon discovered valuable benefits during his internship assignment.
“One of the best things that I gained while I have been here—besides getting to work with and examine commonly used equipment (pumps, expansion joints, heat exchangers, etc…)— was learning how to read P&ID drawings,” he said. “Another valuable tool was tracking down piping systems in order to find specific pieces of equipment.”