Honeywell Intelligrated

(summer-fall 2020)

Over the past several months, I worked remotely with Honeywell Intelligrated on a June-December double co-op. The brand new circumstances brought upon us by Covid-19 caused this co-op to be entirely from home, with the exception of hands-on visits onto site (with plenty of safety measures in place!). As a result, I've grown not only in self-sufficiency when things don't end up as planned, but I have also flourished in my ability to keep the standards of my work high, even when no one is there to check.

The Bakersfield, CA PLC team and I during a weekend hike.

My first business trip was out to Bakersfield, California on a project contracted by Amazon. I joined the PLC team, where I saw firsthand exactly what it takes to get such an enormous fulfillment center up and running, and helped out with any and all tasks at hand. This included running plenty of tests by hand, while also utilizing inControlWare and Logix Studio5000 software to complete coordinating checks. Being present in an engineering workplace and directly responsible for my own set of tasks allowed me to confidently fill my allotted role, and this was a major addition to my skills as an engineer.

During my first trip onsite, my team and I visited Sequoia National Park on our day off. That's the largest tree on Earth there on the right!

After returning from the BFL1 site, I quickly was requested to assist at the Akron, Ohio site. While there I worked with my manager and two coworkers who were also learning about PLCs. This time was crucial to my learning process as well as overall development, as I was granted freedom to identify tasks and attempt to address them using my own knowledge and judgement. At first this was nerve-wracking as a co-op, but I rapidly got a handle on how to go about doing so; this included knowing when to ask questions, and when to trust my own intuition and skills. By the end of my time on-site at AKC, I'd helped to test and fix enough lines that most Amazon packages in Northeast Ohio now travel along a conveyor bed on which I've worked!

My time with Honeywell Intelligrated this past term culminated with two stretches of on-site work at the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Amazon Fulfillment site. I assisted in acclimating a second, newer co-op student to PLCs and site standards, as well as travel needs. We worked together for much of this time and focused on solidifying our understanding of more complicated testing and PLC software logic, and when back at home, we worked from many miles apart (Ohio to Puerto Rico!) to assist one another and our peers on-site.

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This experience as a whole taught me the value of learning on a team, progressing with my own personal knowledge attainments, and acting as a guide to another team member. I feel exponentially more confident in my abilities as an engineer to produce high quality results and learn on my feet, whether socially distanced or in person. Going forward, I can say with absolute certainty that this was an invaluable experience applicable to all future endeavors as the springboard for my career in engineering technology.