Year-in-Review: Year 3
It’s been a weird year.
Now of course that much was obvious, what with the global pandemic disrupting everyone’s lives, but since it has dominated every moment since I wrote my last reflection, I feel like it needs to be said before I get started. It’s been hard for everybody, myself included.
In the past year, I’ve completed one partially remote and one fully remote co-op with two different companies and one fully remote academic semester. I moved back to Columbus when we were sent home from UC last year, and I’ve stayed in the area since then, though I’ve moved around a couple of times for various reasons. I will say that one part of the remote working and learning was that I could be close enough to the farm where I keep my horse to ride and work at the barn every day, which has allowed me to make significant progress in my riding, including my first recognized horse trials win with my horse last year and being the Reserve Champion Novice Young Rider on the US Eventing Association leaderboard despite only competing for the last half of the season. The partially remote semester of work at Lake Shore Cryotronics, my second co-op at the company in product development for their material characterization systems unit, was nice because I had the flexibility to determine my schedule as long as I completed the hours to work full-time, and I was able to come into the office during its off-hours and work in person on certain projects with members of my team. I think it was easier than my second co-op to work remotely because I was already comfortable with the company and knew my co-workers from my first semester.
In the spring, I completed my first co-op with Kinetic Vision, an engineering consulting firm in Cincinnati, in their modeling and simulation group, which was fully remote. It was a totally unique experience in terms of the environment and the work that I was doing, which involved learning many programs that I had never used before. It was challenging but rewarding, though I am not sure that it is what I want to do. I will be returning to Kinetic Vision in the fall, though I don’t know if it will be remote or in person yet. I hope to continue to learn new programs and working with the ones I have started with, including LS Dyna and Abaqus, in the next semester.
Remote learning has been hard. Engineering classes are difficult to translate to an online format, but I feel like I have been managing as well as I can. I would like to continue working on my time management in the current summer semester because the workload is immense. I also continued working with Engineers Without Borders as a co-chair of the Roche committee, which presented a challenge since our travel was postponed indefinitely. We were able to set up a remote assessment of the water tower that supports the tanks that feeds the system because the structure was showing signs of failure. I would like to continue working with the group in the future and hopefully I will get a chance to travel with them when we are allowed to do so.
I’ve learned a lot over the past year, though I am thankful for the work of scientists that have produced the vaccine that will allow society to begin to open back up. I don’t want to say that we are going to go back to normal, because I don’t think anyone is going to be the same person that they were a year ago. We must work to make sure that the change makes us stronger and kinder than we were before. I know that has been my goal throughout this crazy year.