Sidney Jones
Digital Portfolio
Internship
The goal of the internship program is to prepare students for their future careers and education. Students have to participate in a required 72-hour internship experience before senior year. Internship is a unique part of our STEM experience. Mentors provide students an opportunity to prepare them for their future career.
We started by looking for potential companies to intern with at our school’s college a career fair. Here, we had to collect at least three business cards from potential mentors we met. We contact the companies who gave us business cards and if those didn’t work out or we didn’t have a potential internship idea, you would have to find one with the help of an admin. Once you secure an internship and have your mentor complete the internship contract, you wait to intern with them. Students complete the 72 hours of interning during STEMmersion or during summer break.
Career Exploration Report
The purpose of this report is to provide research on two careers of interest, along with beneficial internships and colleges that relate to the careers. The process of writing this report started by selecting two careers and developing essential questions. The careers researched in this report are occupational therapy and chemical engineering. After developing the questions, the questions were researched to learn as much about the career as possible. After researching, an internship and a college was selected for each career. Potential internships include Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) and United Rehabilitation Services (URS). WPAFB was selected because there are many people there who working in chemistry related fields. URS was selected because they have physical and occupational therapist. The colleges selected for chemical engineering was University of Cincinnati because students have opportunities to research with major companies. The college I selected for occupational therapy was Xavier University because students can have real world experience by doing fieldwork at local hospitals and internationally in Guatemala. The internship for URS will completed in May of 2020. Soon it will be discovered if occupational therapy is a true career of interest because the experience is being given.
Journal Entries
I worked 8 hours everyday of my internship, here's a look at some of the things I did.
1: All of the interns were given a presentation of the expectations for the summer. We also learned the topic of our group project and group members. After meeting for the first time, we decided on how we thought we should tackle the issue and figure out what each member of the group should work on.
2: I was tasked with researching existing things that could potential solve out problem like bacteria and enzymes that seem to break down plastic. This was the first of my many days I dedicated research on this topic.
3: We attend professional refinement courses every Tuesday and Thursday. They were based on various topics to help prepare us for the future. The first on how to create and format our resume.
4: After some time of researching among our own subtopics, our group decided to try and decipher which items or techniques would be the best to implement into our solution, and what further research needed to be done for those items and techniques.
5: Once our group came up with a concept, I took upon the task of 3D modeling it. I used the software SketchUp to create and edit multiple drafts of our solution.
6: Along with all of the researching, prototyping, and modeling, we had to compile a research paper including an abstract, nomenclature, introduction, background, materials & methods, results & discussion, conclusion, acknowledgments and references.
7: I had to run a couple of our meetings by asking each group member what they worked on and try to guide the conversation so the group has a productive meeting.
8: Each group member was looking for materials for the prototype based on what they had been researching, and for us to get everything we needed, the group members had to send the link to the items to me. I was in charge of our group budget spreadsheet.
9: Once one of my group members constructed the prototype, they also recorded testing the prototype. They shared the results with the rest of the group to make sure everything was running as we hoped.
10: We had a final presentation at the end of our internship experience. It was basically an overview of project, our research, solution (3D model and prototype), and everything we worked on through the summer.
Internship Reflection
This was a major learning and discovery experience. I collaborated with my team to solve our assigned problem with excellence. I gain new collaborative and leadership skills because of how independently our grouped worked. We did have adult mentors who would give us guidance, but everything was up to our group: what we wanted to research, how we wanted to create a solution, etc. We conducted extensive research on microplastics in the ocean to create the ultimate removal solution.
My whole internship was mostly focused on a specific group project on cleaning microplastic in the ocean. I researched types of existing microbes could naturally break down plastic. This was important because the plastic breaking down would be cleaning the ocean. So, by conducting that research my group could figure out what would be the best direction to go in and what would be the best microbe for what we’re going for. We also had to write a research paper consisting of an abstract, nomenclature, introduction, background, materials & methods, results & discussion, conclusion, acknowledgments and references. The research I conducted was a part of the background section. I also spoke on my microbe research as a part of our final presentation so I basically was an expert of microbe research.
I took on the task of 3D modeling my groups solution because I mentioned I have 3D modeling experience from school. I used the online software SketchUp. I had never used this program before this internship, but my mentors made the process of learning the program as easy as possible. First, I just played around with the program to see what it was like to see if it was similar to the software I’ve worked with before (Autodesk Inventor). Then, using old SketchUp lessons created by our mentor, I followed the steps to create a basic key chain. This allowed me to learn how to use all of the tools in the program.
I plan to major in mechanical engineering, and this project’s focus was cleaning microplastic in the ocean. This may not seem like a mechanical engineering project, but it still had a mechanical aspect. My group engineered a prototype of a potential product. Mechanical engineer’s 3D model and create prototypes. I’ve also always had an interest in environmental issues so to have a project focused on an issue I was aware of and engineering a solution to solve it was very different.