On April 20th, I finally started working my summer co-op. All through the year, I had been deliberating over where I would have my co-op; there were so many options. Ultimately, I ended up working with ENE Systems, a building systems technology company. They do more than that, but significantly more than I could say.
ENE has an excellent relationship with Wentworth, and an outsider could easily see that we have a strong preference for Wentworth alums. In engineering, the department I have most contact with, more than half the employees are Wentworth graduates, including the manager.
I had already interned with the company while I was in high school, so it was not difficult to convince them to hire me, but my work is not the same this year. I will be using many of the same technologies and methods, but I will be working in different areas. This afternoon, I finished checking and repairing an entire library of graphical components, generating well over a thousand by the time the job was done.
You may ask how this job is relevant to my major: what do graphics have to do with applied mathematics?
It is not so much the work that is mathematical so much as the approach. My boss more or less gave me an set of components, told me they were broken, and asked me to give him a fixed set quickly. My approach was wide open and I had freedom to tackle the problem any way I wanted. So before actually setting to work, I analyzed a few possible methods and tried to figure out how I could approach the problem most efficiently – there is actually an immense mathematical concept devoted to this called critical path analysis. Then, I tried to figure out how much I could automate using tools I knew I had (like python, which I learned during math class) and how I would have to learn new things. Then I started. My supervisor allotted 2 months for the project, starting last Tuesday, and I am finishing up today, less than 10 days later.
Work is like this for many Wentworth students. They secure their job, come in, and apply what they have learned. The work ethic and skills developed during their studies at the institute astound their employers, and they are employed happily ever after.