Music blasting, wind plowing through the open windows, cornfields as far as the eye could see. I was definitely in Indiana. I arrived at Columbus in mid-May of 2013 to intern for Cummins Inc., one of the world’s leading diesel engine manufacturers. After driving through a few backroads, I pulled up to a huge country house; this is where I would be living for the summer. The owner, Eric, lived with a roommate, Clay, in this big 6-bedroom house. Eric, wanting to make a little extra cash, rented out the rest of the rooms to Cummins interns during their stay in Columbus. I was excited for this summer! A bunch of guys living together in huge property, this was basically a frat house. Once everyone moved throughout the next day or so, Eric took us for a ride to show us around the town. Columbus is a small town surrounded by cornfields and backcountry about an hour south of Indianapolis. This was very new for me, I’m from South Florida and I had never lived in such a small town. To top it all, Columbus was basically Cummins.  Out of the forty five thousand people that live in Columbus, a little over ten thousand are employed by Cummins; that’s about one in four people that work for this company. Naturally, many of the buildings around the central part of this city were Cummins.  Eric drove us around all of the offices and testing facilities, then showed us the building that we would be reporting to the following Monday.

My first day, we reported to the Cummins corporate headquarter for orientation. Here I met the other interns and HR personnel that would be running the summer program. I found my name tag on one of the tables in the training room and sat down. Next to our name plate was our employee badge as well as some literature about the company and the program. This was it, the Cummins adventure begins. Upon further review of the paper work in front of me, I learned my placement within the company and my manager. I would be interning as a product validation and testing engineer for the Emission Solutions department under my new boss, Kedar Malankar. I wasn’t really sure what this mean but I was eager to find out the role entailed.

After a couple of days of training, we were to report to our new managers in our respective buildings. I met Kedar outside the CES building, which stands for Cummins Emission Solutions; it was one of the newer buildings and thus very high tech and progressive in its construction and layout. He brought me upstairs and introduced me to the team. They all seemed like great people, I was stoked to be there. The work area was very different to what I had imagined. It was what they call an open, collaborative workspace. This meant a bound out empty desks in a very open floor plan. Every desk had a phone and a laptop dock. The employees would pick their seating location every day then would log into that desk phone, dock their laptop, and get going with the day. This progressive workspace was amazing. The company had places balcony areas with couches and lounge chairs around the building where employees would work from. They even had treadmills that you could dock your laptop to and work while getting the blood flowing.

Now, onto the role itself. Any engine is comprised of many components besides just the engine block itself. Cummins is a manufacturer of all the components of their engines. They manufacture the blocks, pistons, fuel injectors, exhaust and emissions systems, turbos, cooling systems, engine computing modules, and everything else. Thus, there were so many buildings and testing facilities. I was placed in the Emissions Solutions, which meant that we designed and tested all the systems downstream from the engine. We produced the components from the headers, to the downpipes, the smart catalytic converters, silencers, and exhaust plumes. The emissions world is a very important part of the company and it was what would set Cummins part from its competitors. In a modern world full of government regulations, particularly in the emissions sectors, only the manufacturers that were able to continue production while meeting these standards were going to survive. The specific team I was placed in was focused on the catalytic converters of Workhorse, Shadowfax, and Atlantic engine projects. These were smaller engines ranging from six to 20 liters in displacement volume. Though these engines sound much larger than your average automotive two to five liter gasoline motors, some of the biggest Cummins engines are in the ninety-five liter range.  So yes, I was working in small engines for Cummins standards.

Inside the emissions world, particularly catalytic converters, there were many different teams behind the production of one system. In my case, I was a packaging validation and testing engineer. Kedar and his team were in charge of working closely with the design team to create testing processes for the structure of the catalytic converters and oversee the actual testing. We designed a lot of performance and material testing for the catalytic converters. A lot of our work was done on computer simulations where we ran FEA (finite element analysis) on the materials to test the material integrity of the structure. We then rearranged or redesigned the positioning of the components to reduce stress concentrations throughout the structure. Heavier testing was done in specific computers capable of running live simulations of the designs. Here, we were able to see the integrity of the component as it underwent its working cycles. Once the preliminary designs passed all of the computer tests, it was time to manufacture prototypes of the actual part and submit them to real life testing. This was done in special testing cells in one of the laboratory facilities a few miles away. Inside these cells were fully mounted diesel motors hooked up to computers that were continuously measuring every aspect and parameter of the running engine. Our newly manufactured prototypes were mounted to these engines and tested at different RPM’s for thousands of hours; yes, thousands. As the testing engineers, we were in constant communication with the test cell operators and received daily data on our parts. If a part failed early, meaning a weld broke or the structure couldn’t hold, we brought back the failed components to the team for further analysis. The main role here was to understand why this fail occurred and how it could be fixed. This type of back and forth designing and testing stages were done for all of the engine components, not just the emission systems. After all the engine’s components passed testing and inspections, the manufacturing engineers took over and devised the assembly line necessary to begin productions. As you can see, it is a long, painstaking process to take a motor from the design stage to the manufacturing stage. In my time in Cummins as I was only exposed to small sliver of the design and test stage of the engine projects I was assigned to. From beginning to end, these engines could take several years before they see their first open road.

My main scope for the internship was to learn as much as possible about the design and manufacturing processes, and show how much value could add to a Cummins as a potential employee. Aside from learning, I was tasked with three different projects that I had to complete by the end of the summer. The first project was to design a tear down procedure for the testing technicians to disassemble the Shadofax and Workhorse emissions systems. First, I had to become very familiar with part and all its working components, then understand how they all came together to form one unit. I was to create a comprehensive report that the team could provide the technicians. Apparently, they were having issues with the testing cell operators taking apart the components in the wrong order or with the wrong methods and damaging the parts. The finalized report came out great, I included exploded views from our CAD renderings and effectively illustrated the assembly and dismantling procedures for our systems. As far as I know, this process is still utilized in the emission testing cells at Cummins.

My second project was to compile the Tier 4 incident reports into a centralized database so trends could be fully analyzed. Like I mentioned before, there was a lot of back and forth between the design and testing stages. Tier $ mean that this was the fourth iteration of the design, and each design was subjected to thousands of hours worth of material and performance testing. One Tier could easily have a few dozen prototypes undergoing testing each reporting several failures. Needless to say, there were hundreds of test result reports each describing the performance and failure of each part. I was tasked with gathering all this data and working with another engineer on the team compile it all in a central repository in a way that could be easy accessed or analyzed. The point of this was easily visualize the data and be able to pull trends and analyze which failures were recurring or which were outliers. In the end, this could save the company a significant amount of money by reducing testing and analysis time. By mid-summer, I finished pulling the data off the individual reports and compiling it into the central database. I then handed the project off to a software engineer who was going to automate the data repository and put it on a central server. Unfortunately, this part was not completed by the end of my internship and I was never able to see the final result.

The third and final project was the most intricate. I was only able to take part in the initial stages since my time at Cummins was so short. All the parts that were tested, whether they passed or failed, were stored in a nearby storage facility run by a company called Celadon. Due to the many trips between the testing and storage facilities and the hundreds of test subjects, keeping track of the parts was a nightmare; there were several misplaced and lost specimens. A full-time employee, and Six Sigma green belt, was task with devising a system from tracking the location of the parts. We created a barcode system and linked it to a central database that we made on the company servers. The scope was for my team to attach one of the barcodes to each part sent for testing and then populate the specs of in the database of the part associated with that code. That way each barcode was assigned to a specific part. Then the technicians or transportation guys would scan the parts every time they left or arrived at one of the facilities. The barcode scanners were connected to the network and would, in real time, show the team where the part was and if it had been shipped or received. Besides the construction of the database and the barcodes themselves, we had to do an updated inventory of everything that was in the testing and storage sites. This is where I had to do the menial intern work and physically go to the sites and document what parts were currently there and tag them with a code. Due to the hundreds of parts and intricacy of building a database, I was not able to witness the completion of this project. I was able to participate in the development of the procedure and the building of the database, but I left shortly after we began to inventory the existing parts.

My Summer as an intern quickly approached its end. My time in Cummins was amazing and I was able to learn a lot about diesel engines and the intricacies of engineering manufacturing. I was able to accomplish everything I set out to do at the beginning of the summer. The exit presentations went great; I received outstanding reviews on my projects and contributions to the company. Though I knew that I this wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, nor did I want to move full time to a small town, I was able to make the best of it and gain a great deal of knowledge.  I grew a lot this summer, both personally and professionally, and now I had to go back to school and reassess my professional future through the lens of this new me. During my internship, I was able to make great friends that I still speak with today. It was time to move onto my next adventure and further think about what I wanted professionally. Though I will never forget the beautiful memories I created in the little mid-west town of Columbus, Indiana.