Yoyo Ni – Engineering Internship

Hi, my name is Yoyo Ni. I am a senior at Garden Spot High School. I work at Case New Holland Industrial (CNH) in New Holland on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I have two mentors, Patrick (Pat) McKinney, the lead designer for the vehicle team, and Clinton Baltz, a design engineer. Although Pat is the lead designer for the vehicle team, much of his work is managing the team rather than the design. Meanwhile, Mr. Baltz and other people on the team work on the vehicle design. Thus, I was placed on the engineering team working on some of the current projects or tasks my mentors are currently working on. The main project’s details are a secret due to confidentiality and the design is not public. However, some of my daily tasks are training on Creo, a CADD design program, gathering build issue data, and transferring these data into a system the company uses. As my mentor said, “The goal of this internship is not only for you to understand the jobs of an engineer, but also to help you familiarize yourself with corporate settings.”

          Before the internship, I did not know if I wanted to be an engineer. I knew I wanted to work with math, science, and possibly history. But I did know if engineering is the right path for me. So, when I first entered the company, I was direct about my goals for this internship: experience what it is like to be an engineer at a company. My mentors immediately put me on for Computed Aided Drafted Design (CADD) training with Creo. Creo was a CADD program that allowed people to design parts, make drawings, and assemble parts visually on a computer. I had used something similar at school; however, some of the features were unknown to me. This forces me to ask for help from my mentors. At first, I was timid to ask for help because it seemed like they had more important tasks than taking some time to help me. However, as time passes, I have grown to realize that these people are casual people who are willing to help. If the person I am asking does not know, they ask somebody else. I learned that coordination and communication between each other benefited each other because I gain answers and help to quicken a certain task that was also beneficial for them to quickly complete in return.

A daily task I perform other than continuing Creo training is helping the company enter build issues and transfer some of them into PIRs. CNH is working on a project for one of their newly designed combines. So there could be design faults, minor annoyances, or other build issues that could affect the whole. Every day I head into the workshop to help the engineers enter build issues. They identify the issues and I would enter the issues into a system that they would use. Although I am not personally identifying the issue because I am not disassembling or assembling the combine, I learned that even minor annoyances could affect production. Since CNH have to mass produce combines worldwide, minor annoyances could cost them millions of dollars in the long run because each combine would have these minor issues if it is not treated. Through the engineers in the workshop, I learn that no designs are perfect. There always are some issues that negatively affect the assembly, production, or design and a flawed from the start. Building issue logs help to communicate these problems to the design engineers who in return would respond to these problems. But because CNH has facilities around the world, some build issues may not be communicated in one place. This is where the Engineer Center (EC), a system CNH uses, comes in to gather all the information so everyone could see.

My responsibility is to transfer build issues into reports (PIRs) that allow design engineers to see the issue and a picture of the issue. This is an inconvenient step because we already have a logging system that allows us to see the build issues and any attachments along with it. However, as Pat summarizes, “That’s how corporate is”.  CNH is a complex worldwide company where different facilities may use different systems to respond to the same thing. They all believe that their system is the easiest for them and refuses to change. This creates issues because there must be an intermediate person who enters PIRs. As the intermediate person, the task is simple, but time-consuming when there are a lot of build issues to enter into the system. But it is an important step to allow all position-level employees to see the build issue, especially the engineers who must fix these issues. Through this, I learned that corporate settings are complex and are not perfect. Different corporates have different things they do well and different things they do not do well compared to CNH. Learning how to operate in a corporate setting and an office is important if you want to work at a large company like CNH.

To conclude, I am still not sure if I want to be an engineer. However, after being in CNH, I learned what I want and do not want in a workplace environment. I want an environment where communication and work coordination are direct. One thing CNH does great is that work time is highly valued, and they respect the time when you are away from work. I know that if I want to become an engineer, I would love to work as a design engineer because the Creo training allow me to understand that I do love to work with 3D computer models. It might not be something related to agriculture, but it might be something else I enjoy doing in life. I think CNH enforced the idea on me that while I do enjoy math, I also enjoy social studies. In the future, I want to somehow combine these two ideas to find an engineering position where I enjoy working in the industry.