Our student this week is Saumya Shah, a mechanical engineering major who accepted a co-op at John Deere Power Products, located in Greeneville, Tennessee.
Shah describes the department he worked in and what his main responsibilities were.
“I worked in the Text support and the ME departments,” he said. “I worked mainly on plant and production line layouts, and on other small projects such as, assisting in the 2015 model year build, relocating welding parts to other locations and optimizing space. I gained experience working on the production line for the first couple of weeks to get to know the process of the build.”
A challenge that Shah had to overcome on this assignment was to optimize the space for new parts to be placed at a specific location.
“I completed a drawing in CAD with dimension of the available space,” he said. “Then I drew a footprint of the parts and placed the parts in the available space to decide which orientation would optimize the space most.”
Shah tells us that receiving a real hands on opportunity working on assembly and other mechanical parts of building tractors was the most beneficial aspect of the assignment.
Shah enjoyed, “Gaining valuable CAD experience, exposure to other 3D software, and having the opportunity to gain experience working a production line.”