Hi Everyone!
It has been quite some time since I posted an update so I thought I would take this post to go through my last half of 2016 and start of the new school year.
I took a semester break from school for the fall 2016 session to work as a Manufacturing Engineering Co-Op with St. Jude Medical, a medical device company located in Sylmar, CA. Making the choice to leave school for 6 months was a tough decision, but by far the best choice I have made in college thus far. St. Jude Medical is such an amazing company where I worked with some of the brightest, kindest, and best people I have ever met.
I worked at the cardiac rhythm management site where pace makers and other devices related to CRM are manufactured.
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- This is the Durata Lead that SJM manufactures and one of the products I worked on!
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- I also worked on pacemakers like this one!
I worked in manufacturing engineering which I am sure is different in all companies, but at SJM the manufacturing engineers do a little bit of everything. With this, I was exposed to so many different areas of engineering like product development, quality, research and development, and regulatory. Not only did I interact with so many different engineers and was able to contribute to multiple projects, but I was also able to go onto the manufacturing floors, in the clean rooms and really get introduced to how the devices were conceptualized, proposed, and eventually made. One of my main projects included implementing a new automated process. Through this project I saw the timeline of implementation play out from the very beginning idea to the final touches for submission.
My SJM roommate Brenda and I at the heart walk
My choice to do a co-op was life changing and I feel incredibly lucky that my experience showed me the type of work I love and hope to do for the rest of my life.
With that sentimental note I transitioned into this new semester with a renewed sense of determination to tackle all the engineering classes ahead of me. I am taking organic chemistry, an upper division BME course, physics, a GE called chemical forensics and piano this semester. I also accepted an internship offer to be an engineering intern this summer with the pharmaceutical and device company Abbott, who coincidentally just acquired St. Jude Medical.
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