Job Shadow Reflection

I want to become an engineer in the future, so I decided I wanted to job shadow one to
find out if I was still interested after I did the job shadow. How I got in touch with an engineer
was, threw my mother, I asked if she had any friends or patients (because she’s a dental
hygienist) that were part of a company that engineered anything. Well, she gave me an
immediate answer, her patient and good friend Russ Stout is a business plan for a company
called Ortho Development down in Draper Utah. Russ was an engineer and product developer
for that company he just was moved around a lot. I reached out to him on the phone a day after
Christmas, and I asked him if I could job shadow him. He was very enthusiastic about the
request that I gave him and told me that I could job shadow there.
Two days after Christmas I was able to go to there building and check out what they did
at Ortho Development. What Ortho Development does is they create and produce titanium
screws, moving replacement joints, titanium rods, and all sorts of pieces they can use to replace
anything in their spine. It was amazing the things that they could do. They have three CAD
z-axis CAD machines where they take a solid piece of titanium and they put it in these machines
and they mill the blocks into the pieces that they send to hospitals all around the world. They
could mil plastic material and metal material. Some of the parts they want to test out so instead
of making a prototype with the titanium they use the plastic instead and see how it performs.
An amazing part of the Job Shadow was doing some programming for a new machine
part that one of the engineers was created to cut these plastic rings that go inside a prosthetic hip
joint. We used some Arduino code in order to make up all the processes of cutting these plastic
rings. We spent a good hour on running this program. The engineer and I had a little moch set
up of what the machine was going to look like and how it was going to perform. We plugged it
into some operating systems from a computer and see if we could make this machine the right
way in order for it to be precise so they could make it and use it for a long time.
When we got done with that I got to see how a 3D printer works. We just printed out
some of the prototype peaces out on I go to see how they worked before they made the final
products. This led to one of my questions I asked the engineer, “how do you guys put your
company logo on all these metal pieces that they were making?” He then answered me very
quickly and said, “we use a very powerful laser printer.” He showed me some of the things that
they do with it, and it was so cool to see that lazer print out their company logo on this piece of
high grade metal that was in the shape of one of there many products.
All around this one of the best experiences that I’ve had in my life, and it definitely
showed me what a real engineering job looks like, and some of the main things that they have to
do. This career field is definitely something I would love to do for a job for a long time. So I
strive to do whatever I can do to prepare a way for myself to get there.