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On June 23 2011 13:48 Riku wrote:
Alright, as for moving away, I don't want to do it because I've spent the past two years away from home without visiting for more than a week at a time. Since this is my last chance ever to spend significant time with my parents and cats, I was hoping to work from home this summer. Trust me, I don't mind living on my own, but, as an only child, I feel like I should give my parents as much time as I can when I'm not my usual 1,200 miles away.
I'm a chem eng grad student and worked two internships when I was in undergrad. Both of them were over 900 miles away from home. I know what you mean when you want to stick around family and this alone would give me the motivation to tough it out (especially since grad school is 1000 miles from home!).
What concerns me is an internship is about LEARNING. It's supposed to be beneficial to me. Right now? Sure, I learned about the machines, but I learned basically all I could on the first day. Now I'm not being cheap labor (as I'm hired as a contractor, being paid less, etc). I am being forced to do assembly work that teaches me nothing, get paid less than the other workers, and still have to deal with a longer commute than anyone else who works there.
Let's look at an internship from a company perspective: The engineers are typically overworked and have a number of projects they can't reach. Solution: hire another engineer to pick up the slack, or hire an intern every summer to complete the projects. Economically, hiring the intern is the better option because they're cheaper, ambitious, and usually don't have tremendous family obligations. I don't know what you were expecting, but all you're describing sounds like an internship to me!
You're complaining about having to work the line, but I don't think you realize how much you're gaining from this. Yes, a smart person can pick up on the machine and know it inside and out in (at most) a week. Stop focusing on this aspect. Look around you. See everyone else working? This is sending a message to the floor workers that you are no different from them, gives you a taste of the REAL movers and shakers of a plant, and allows you to foster relationships with them. One of the biggest lessons I learned from my first internship was that the engineers knew nothing compared to those who worked the floor. Whenever an engineer changes something it affects the floor workers. Whenever something breaks down the floor workers are on site and start troubleshooting. The floor workers are by and large the best consultants you have regarding the entire process. If you can't see things from their perspective then you'll never accomplish anything as an engineer.
I'm actually jealous of the experience they're offering you. I would have learned the process a lot quicker working the floor at my internships (two weeks working versus a full month of tracing pipes, chemical lines, and drawing flow charts). And who's to say the "real" engineering work would be any good? At my first internship I spent FIVE WEEKS manually entering 4 months worth of process data into a database. Why? Because the managers and engineers didn't enforce it! This is the real world, not your vision of it. It's only temporary, so take in the experience - for better or worse!
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so the OP works 4 days a week and he allready is tired?
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You probably should. Mechanical engineering doesn't sound right for you.
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Every internship requires a bit of self-sacrifice. It is through that you establish yourself as a dedicated employee within your office and you can rise steadily and receive the benefits that come with loyalty and a reputation for hard work. Your hours kind of suck but you do get 3 days off per week, which is pretty good. It also allows you to live at home, which has its benefits.
The other thing I don't get is the complaining about the assembly line work. Most jobs like to start off young employees at different positions so they can see everything the company does and have an understanding of the processes and what everyone goes through. You should also use this opportunity to see if the work you're doing has any effect on the problem you'll have to solve. Maybe it's a process error?
I'm also a Mechanical Engineer but I personally love grunt work and being on the operating floor. It gives me the chance to be around the machines I find so fascinating and also do some meaningless, repetitive task that requires no thinking but gives me an easy and satisfying result.
You haven't even been there that long. Just stick it out and take pleasure in the things you have to do. The reward will come later on.
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That's the nature of internships. A lot of times they make you do useless stuff (and often times, with no pay, be happy you got a paying one!).
What you actually do is irrelevant. You will actually learn engineering when you get a full time job, not from school, not from internships. Suck it up so you can have something to put on your resume when you apply for a real job, that's pretty much the whole point.
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You seem to have a disgusting sense of entitlement...good luck in your career, you are going to need it if shit like this gets your panties in a bunch. Internships suck, but did you really expect them to just hand you a cushy engineering job right out of school? Oh no, a few weeks of manual labor! Compare that to what doctors go through before they start practicing and I think you will see that you are being unreasonable.
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On June 24 2011 05:39 Lemonwalrus wrote:
You seem to have a disgusting sense of entitlement...good luck in your career, you are going to need it if shit like this gets your panties in a bunch. Internships suck, but did you really expect them to just hand you a cushy engineering job right out of school? Oh no, a few weeks of manual labor! Compare that to what doctors go through before they start practicing and I think you will see that you are being unreasonable.
I was lied to and misinformed about the job. I am upset about being mislead, not because I feel self-entitled. And, admittedly, I probably wouldn't have taken the job if I was aware of this, but isn't that my choice?
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Knowing the manufacturing process and all the steps involved will make you better able to adjust the design for these materials while still keeping such things as cost of manufacture and man-hours needed to create something in mind. Suck it up, this WILL make you better able to do your job, this will put things in perspective, this will make you care about the company rather than just the science, this will make you feel like you are part of the community, this will make you better able to communicate with the lowly manufacturers should they ever give you that unspeakable task.
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On June 24 2011 05:52 Riku wrote:
I was lied to and misinformed about the job.
But the way you describe the situation, it's pretty clear that they intend the first two weeks to be preparation for the engineering work to follow. I think that interpreting this as some kind of malicious falsehood about what they'd be having you do seems more to spring from your frustration about being asked to do something you dislike than to reflect the situation accurately.
The cost to them of having you spend two weeks doing that work is almost certainly more than the benefit, since you're spending only 20 hours at each job station. Also, were they asking you to do it for an extended period, I would absolutely agree with your take on the matter, but they're not.
Edit: My advice to you in private message, which I'll repeat here, was to stick it out for two weeks and see if they're serious about that timeframe for this type of work. You're nearly done with week one at this point, right? So it's only four more workdays?
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On June 23 2011 11:56 dazed wrote:
I'm surprised at all these responses that say to suck it up. If the job ain't making you happy, its simply not worth it. Life is so short and spending half the day being miserable isn't living.
I have to answer this, from the point of view of having a career that in general I find deeply satisfying, which, if you missed it, I blogged about here: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=230005
It doesn't matter what you do, how much it matters to you, or how much you enjoy it. It doesn't matter whether you work for yourself or someone else. No matter what, you'll have to do things you don't enjoy doing, sometimes for days, months, or years. There comes a time in every job, even the best jobs, where you simply have to do something that's somewhere between irritating or painful to get the work done.
Everywhere I've ever worked, there have been people who found ways to avoid things they didn't like to do. Sometimes this manifests itself as not wanting to learn a new way to do something because a person dislikes the unfamiliar feeling of doing something they don't know how to do. Sometimes this is simply a matter of leaving "grunt work" as slack for others to pick up just to make sure it gets done. Sometimes it even turns into leaving critical aspects of work undone, which can start to affect the effectiveness of a team.
In this instance, Riku's right to say that spending the entire summer assembling widgets isn't what she signed up to do, and if that's in fact what they're asking her to do, she won't get what she hopes to out of the job.
However, to quit a job because they have asked her to spend a limited, closed-ended period of eight ten-hour days (if I'm counting right) doing work that they feel is an important experience for an engineer at their company to have had, because she finds it repetitive and frustrating, would be a rash decision. There's a substantial possibility that it may simply be to see how willing she is to do whatever she's asked.
All I can say is, if two unpleasant weeks, standing alone, are enough to make you quit even a summer job, sooner or later you're going to have to find a new relationship to unpleasant work, because there will be more, and a lot of it, if you hope to succeed at anything at all.
Parting thought: If anyone here thinks that a hard-working professional Starcraft player like IdrA always loves that eighth consecutive hour of practice as much as the first, you're probably severely misled. Satisfaction in the long-term goal just about always requires deferring satisfaction for the short-term, at least from time to time.
Edit: Riku, I wont make any more posts in this thread. Sorry to belabor the point, and I hope things work out regardless of what you decide to do. 
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Calgary25996 Posts
On June 23 2011 11:10 Riku wrote:
but I figure if I'm an engineer and I can't figure out a machine in an hour (let alone the 20 hours they want me to put in at each station), that I shouldn't have been hired in the first place.
This line really rubs me the wrong way. No professional engineer would ever speak like this. That and you aren't an engineer - you're an engineering student.
Anyways, being in the field is great. Not only do you get to see the equipment first hand, you get to speak to the operators and learn about issues with the equipment.
"Oh sometimes this part doesn't fit properly so we have to grind it down." Why is that? What can be done to fix that problem?
"These things are junk - the sensors needs to be recalibrated monthly." What is causing that problem?
I think it's a cool approach your company is taking. When I first started, I went to the field as much as possible. Sometimes people were running other projects and I just went to watch them for a day so I could learn what they were doing. I still try to go to the field as much as I can.
It's amazing how much knowledge you get when you have actually seen and touched the equipment that you're later designing on paper. I have friends who design systems and have no idea what the equipment they are sizing actually looks like. It's just a box on a P&ID.
I can't really convince you because the tone of your OP seems to be that engineers are in the ivory tower while the plebes assemble machines below. Those are the engineers that end up at EPCs sizing pumps and copy pasting processes all their lives. The ones who have actually gone to the field and gotten their hands dirty are the ones that notice "that design looks good on paper but it won't fit through the building door, we need to install it in two pieces."
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Look at it in the scope of your whole career, two weeks is really nothing. If you like that other internship better, go for it, but not for this reason. I got a job once repairing and installing gasoline pumps because the new systems were Windows based so they wanted someone with IT experience on the team, that's where I came in. I was really pissed off because they promised me all this stuff about sending me to trade schools and such only I took the job and had to spend the first 6 weeks in the warehouse being a grunt. Well I almost quit but I am really glad I didn't, it turned into one of the more enjoyable jobs I have had and the time in the warehouse helped me earn the respect of the guys there. It's also nice to have that kind of stuff on a resume, yes I am smart and I'm also a hard worker and I can pretty much do anything I want. That is what I can take to an interview, diversity is nice.
Just my 2 cents.
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i agree with chill's latest post 100%, the sense of entitlement that a lot of engineering students display is amazingly pathetic
it's 80 hours plus at most 20 hours of commute to do shit you don't want to do, so it's at most 100 hours of your life, when you've already stated that spending time with your parents and cats are an important facet of the summer, i seriously pity any company that hires you if that's your attitude.
Also i fail to remotely see how you were lied to and misled, i'm sure they told you there would be a 2 week orientation, or an 80 hour orientation, or something like that.
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On June 24 2011 07:17 Coramoor wrote:
i agree with chill's latest post 100%, the sense of entitlement that a lot of engineering students display is amazingly pathetic
it's 80 hours plus at most 20 hours of commute to do shit you don't want to do, so it's at most 100 hours of your life, when you've already stated that spending time with your parents and cats are an important facet of the summer, i seriously pity any company that hires you if that's your attitude.
Also i fail to remotely see how you were lied to and misled, i'm sure they told you there would be a 2 week orientation, or an 80 hour orientation, or something like that.
No, they didn't tell me anything about an orientation or anything whatsoever about me doing anything but engineering. Though they did tell me lots and lots about the project that I get to work on... eventually.
*Shrug*
I just wrote a 10 page report and e-mailed it to my boss. I'm not a slacker, I just want to fix the problems without wasting time.
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that's fine and all, i just don't understand the big deal over 2 weeks, 1 of which is already done
you're 50% of the way there
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On June 23 2011 22:07 Chill wrote:Show nested quote +On June 23 2011 14:32 PhatCop wrote:
To be honest, you sound like you have no idea how the real world works.
1) Everyone starts low. Coffee runs, photocopying bitch, mindless paper pusher - some one has to do them, and it's usually the intern or the newest guy.
2) This is because contrary to what fresh graduates or penultimate year university students think, they usually know jack all, and managers are not stupid enough to let people who have no idea what they are doing to mess up, since they have to clean up after you when you screw up.
3) Sure, you may have some sort of theory based knowledge, but the real world is about experience. That's why work experience is an important part in your CV. You will learn so much via experience then you ever will from studying. Even if you think you won't learn anything, you will. (unless you aren't looking to learn).
4) For example, in your case, you may know how the assembly line works in a day. However, do you know what is the most frequent problem that occurs with the machine that causes downtimes of more then 30 mins? Do you know what causes it, and can alter your designs at a R&D level to minimise this risk, since the company can't afford to buy new machines? Can you establish relationships with people down there working in the factories to obtain timely, accurate feedback if you are sitting in your office from day 1?
5) 2 weeks is nothing. People do assembly work for their entire lives. People do much worse work in order for a chance to gain a foothold into the industry. There are people out there who would take this opportunity with both hands and never let go.
6) Given your past record of quitting internships, I'd say you need to grow up and stop thinking so snobbishly. Take advices from the people in this thread (because it sounds like you aren't taking it). If you think like this for the rest of your life, you won't get very far. I started writing up a reply and then I found that this comment says what I was going to say. I went through a phase in first and second year where I thought "I'm an engineering student!" Then I realized I didn't know shit about engineering yet and worked my summers assembling cars on night shift.
Most of the people who have hired me have been extremely impressed with my skills from day one. They might start me off doing inventory or sorting files, but within a week, they often have me building mission-critical systems.
But then again, I'm like 20 and already have like 4+ years of work experience, plus I go to an Ivy league school, so I probably have some unfair advantages :\
I guess having employable skills and coming from a brand-name school are quite useful talents toi have! Maybe work on brushing up your resume so that this doesn't happen in your next internship or fulltime job?
User was temp banned for this post.
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On June 24 2011 12:31 Gummy wrote:Show nested quote +On June 23 2011 22:07 Chill wrote:On June 23 2011 14:32 PhatCop wrote:
To be honest, you sound like you have no idea how the real world works.
1) Everyone starts low. Coffee runs, photocopying bitch, mindless paper pusher - some one has to do them, and it's usually the intern or the newest guy.
2) This is because contrary to what fresh graduates or penultimate year university students think, they usually know jack all, and managers are not stupid enough to let people who have no idea what they are doing to mess up, since they have to clean up after you when you screw up.
3) Sure, you may have some sort of theory based knowledge, but the real world is about experience. That's why work experience is an important part in your CV. You will learn so much via experience then you ever will from studying. Even if you think you won't learn anything, you will. (unless you aren't looking to learn).
4) For example, in your case, you may know how the assembly line works in a day. However, do you know what is the most frequent problem that occurs with the machine that causes downtimes of more then 30 mins? Do you know what causes it, and can alter your designs at a R&D level to minimise this risk, since the company can't afford to buy new machines? Can you establish relationships with people down there working in the factories to obtain timely, accurate feedback if you are sitting in your office from day 1?
5) 2 weeks is nothing. People do assembly work for their entire lives. People do much worse work in order for a chance to gain a foothold into the industry. There are people out there who would take this opportunity with both hands and never let go.
6) Given your past record of quitting internships, I'd say you need to grow up and stop thinking so snobbishly. Take advices from the people in this thread (because it sounds like you aren't taking it). If you think like this for the rest of your life, you won't get very far. I started writing up a reply and then I found that this comment says what I was going to say. I went through a phase in first and second year where I thought "I'm an engineering student!" Then I realized I didn't know shit about engineering yet and worked my summers assembling cars on night shift. Most of the people who have hired me have been extremely impressed with my skills from day one. They might start me off doing inventory or sorting files, but within a week, they often have me building mission-critical systems. But then again, I'm like 20 and already have like 4+ years of work experience, plus I go to an Ivy league school, so I probably have some unfair advantages :\ I guess having employable skills and coming from a brand-name school are quite useful talents toi have! Maybe work on brushing up your resume so that this doesn't happen in your next internship or fulltime job?
don't be so humble man
tell us about ur strengths
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Smix
United States4549 Posts
and that is how you become gummiggit
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ALLEYCAT BLUES50643 Posts
too many ggits will spoil the Blog section.
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EPT
