Bryan Monro Armitage

My experience at Boehringer Laboratories has been an invaluable part of my education as an engineer. As a dual degree student pursuing a rigorous five-year program I had originally decided not to participate in the engineering cooperative program. It did not seem like I would have the time or interest to devote a semester to working away from school. When I first decided that I would participate in the program I did so to get away from Cornell for a semester. I now realize, that this decision, regardless of the motivation, was one of the best academic decisions that have made.

When I first arrived at Boehringer I did not know exactly what to expect. I knew that the person with whom I interviewed was energetic and enthusiastic about the company and from my two plant visits that this was not a company that was going to have me playing solitaire on a computer all day waiting for something to do. However, unlike courses at school, there was no definite course description and I wasn't quite sure of what I would be doing or what I was getting into.

My first day at work consisted of about a half hour of introduction and paper work, some of which lingered for the rest of the day as I had to fill out this form and that. Then I was introduced to the lab and the system I would be working with, consisting of an introduction to the problems involved in where we were in development and a few of the goals of where we wanted to be. That was about it for the training, a little more than an hour, and at that point I started down a 5 month road that at the time seemed very hazy, difficult, and exciting. I realized very quickly that this was not a place to sit and have people tell you what to do, rather, you were responsible for telling people what you wanted to do and they would help guide you.

My first few months came with many moments of joy and what usually seemed like many more of frustration. I was involved in a real engineering project with dozens more variables than I had ever dealt with at school. No longer was a solution as simple as "this works better". The questions, "How much will it cost?" "Can we mold that?" "Is it reliable?", "Is it user friendly?", and even sometimes "How does it look?", along with many more seemed to keep creeping in every time I would find something that I thought worked better. I started to realize that there was a big difference between engineering and just design. Someone once told me the engineering is the useful and cost effective application of scientific knowledge and theory. I started to see this more and more each day as we moved closer to releasing a product into the market place.

I also started to learn valuable lessons about how a company works and how to work with people. At school when you form a group to work on a project everyone has there own specialties that they are good or enjoy, but usually no one has a specific skill that they are trained to excel at above an beyond everyone else. Usually you are all on a somewhat similar level in most of the aspects of the project you are going to tackle. This is not the case in a company. For a simple example, engineers are not machinists and machinists are not engineers. You also have production workers, shop heads, secretaries, vendors, salesmen, and the list goes on. For each new group of people I needed to communicate with, I had to learn a new way of communicating, which in some cases seems like a whole new language. Communication became a key to accomplishing anything. Although this is in true in many group situations in the classroom setting, you rarely encounter the diversity of a work place environment.

I also found that communications was not just the key to accomplishing my own particular project but also was the key to getting involved in projects that were of interest to me. Many situations would arise where I would be interested in another aspect of the project and found that by voicing my interest and knowledge about this area I could acquire more responsibilities in an area that I was interested in pursuing. This led, in part, to my many travels out into the field to test the performance of our system and introduced another aspect of engineering not available at school, customer interaction. It was always challenging and exciting, never knowing quite what a new surgery or situation would bring and you always had to be quick on your feet to answer a question or tackle unexpected problems.

I feel that these first experiences prepared me for the even less constrained atmosphere that I am experiencing in returning for my second term here at Boehringer. I am learning how to work with little supervision and high accountability. Although confusing sometimes, the "open door" here allow me to talk to any number of people if I loose direction so that I may refocus my efforts or just to gain better insight into the problems I'm dealing with. I don't have someone standing over my shoulder telling me what I need to do to get my work done, what is the next step, when I should leave, or what exactly the y expect of me. I'm expected to perform as a professional engineer.

With my experiences here I feel that I'm better equipped to make a valuable contribution in my career after school. I have been able to pursue my own interests in aspects of engineering that are not available in a classroom setting, allowing me a better perspective of what I would like to do with my education. These experiences have also given me the confidence in knowing that I can perform as an engineer, this is something that I'm sure I would be questioning had I not taken the opportunity to challenge myself in a working environment.