Ecolab: An internship story
An interview with Tanisha Randhawa
How did you feel when you found out you got the internship? Has that feeling changed?
I was very excited when I got my internship offer from Ecolab in December because it meant that I wouldn’t have to stress about getting an internship during the Spring semester. After having completed the internship, I am both excited and stressed to enter the major Fall recruiting season for a full-time position next year. Interning at Ecolab gave me very valuable experiences working in a manufacturing plant as a production engineer that I hope will make a difference when applying to positions throughout this semester.
What were some struggles and how did you overcome them?
I think the biggest challenge I had during my internship with Ecolab was getting assigned a project I had no idea how to do in the beginning. My main project involved designing a system to calculate the Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) of the manual packaging lines in the plant, but I didn’t even know what OEE was when I first started. I overcame this challenge by asking a ton of questions to both the Total Productive Management (TPM) team, comprised of 3 TPM engineers, and my TPM manager, Adrian. I also had to do quite a bit of self-learning on what OEE is and how to calculate it by looking through powerpoint presentations they had about OEE and searching on the internet for examples of calculations and systems.
Do you feel like the Fellowship helped prepare you for this internship and if so, how?
I think the Fellowship helped prepare me for this internship when it came to the design process of the system and making it user-friendly. I thought a lot about the person who would be using the tools and how to make it as simple as possible while obtaining all the necessary information so that it could be easy and correctly utilized. After making a prototype, I had operators test out the system to see if they had any feedback for changes that needed to be made and when through a few iterations before finalizing the design.
Where do you want to go from here?
Through my internship with Ecolab, I’ve learned that I really do enjoy working as a production engineer in a manufacturing plant. I hope that I’ll be working in a similar type of role next year as a full-time engineer but in the Bay Area instead of the Midwest. However, I do want to work in the biomedical field so hopefully it’ll be at a pharmaceutical or biomedical device company instead of a chemical one next time!
How might this affect your work with the Fellowship?
I think that looking into this next year with the Fellowship, I really want to utilize my technical design skills like CAD to create a product that will help people with their health and wellness in some way. I want to do more designing, prototyping, testing, and iterating in a hands-on way so that I practice my passion and have more experience doing what I want to do in the future.
Tanisha Randhawa is a passionate mechanical engineering student aiming to utilize engineering to design innovative, sustainable solutions to improve the health and lives of people and protect the environment.
