University of Dayton - MyLife

Back to the Office

Hello there... I know you all are happy to see that I made it through finals week and seeing many of my good friends graduate in one piece! So what has been going on in my life, Let's see, I went on an interview for a full time position last month at Frito-Lay in Wooster Ohio and it was really great. I never knew so many things went into a bag of chips, since I am an Industrial Engineer I am really interested in processes and such and I was amazed at how they run their facility. The interview was on a Thursday and Friday so Thursday night they took me and the other candidates that were interviewing to dinner at a nice steakhouse, then the "real" interviews were Friday morning. Can you believe that they did all that for me dinner, nice hotel, plant tour and really good lunch (I had to pay for nothing), I mean I know I am amazing but I was surprised how much they invest in their potential employees! Just so you are not about to fall out of your seat in anticipation, they did make me an offer that following Monday but I still have several months before I graduate so they have given me a few months to make my final decision.

So I started work last Monday and my first day back I was going to Louisiana for a work assignment (co-oping for a good company such as Emerson Climate Technologies where I am working has great perks co-ops at some other companies do not get to travel at all). So since I did not have much time between the finals week and my first day of work I of course procrastinated on packing my clothes for the trip, I mean did you expect otherwise of me? As I am packing I wonder what happened to all of my work clothes. It was like they had walked away or something. Every time I go back to work, I go shopping for new clothes but I could not find anything, it's like they all escaped so I had to spend way more money than I anticipated but it was an investment.

On my first day of work I had to come into the office before heading to the airport for my flight and time really flies when you have things to do. By the time I made it to work, got my security badge and parking pass, signed "first day of work" paperwork and got to my desk I had like 30 minutes to make sure I had network access, pack up my laptop and get my work cell phone before I had to run right back out of the door to the airport. What a busy morning but I made it through and before I knew it I was in sunny Louisiana eating the best seafood ever. The whole purpose of the trip was to conduct a design of experiments (DOE) on an issue that was reoccurring in all of the plants. During this DOE we tried to re-create the issue that was happening in the plant and it was engineering at its best, all of you future engineers would have loved it. One of the things that I like best about engineering is that concept of trial and error. That is exactly what we experienced in this experiment. Though to some the resulting data did not exactly tell us what we wanted to know, it did open our eyes about other ways we could potentially save our company lots of time and money so I would say that it was a great success and we achieved many ancillary goals in the process!

Today is my first day actually working in the office and it is going along pretty good, I have tied up some lose ends from my trip and gotten reacquainted with some other aspects of work so I am pretty much set to have a great summer, my last summer as a co-op, here. I also start summer school tonight :( I am taking 3 classes, so keep me in your prayers at night that I make it to August without going completely crazy. Talk to you all later!

May 12, 2008 2:05 PM Permalink