Hello QUESTees! I hope your fall is off to a great start! For this month’s issue, we’re highlighting how three QUEST students went above and beyond during their summers! From creating a website for local non-profits to working on airplanes, let’s go see their stories!
Jack Campbell, a junior Computer Science major (Cohort 43), spent his summer interning at Meta in San Francisco, California.
As a University Intern at Meta, Campbell honed his skills in React, a popular web application framework, to create a website that helps local non-profits showcase their essential services, like food banks and job training programs, to their communities. All the while, Campbell networked with professionals, gaining impactful advice each day. “I learned so much about working with other people, dividing up codebases and writing code reviews well. It’s a skill I never got to practice before. Learning about the industry standard way of doing things directly from experts across the company was great,” Campbell said.
When asked for his fondest memory of the summer, Campbell described a trip he organized with five other interns to the Redwood National Park, home to over 130,000 acres of the world’s tallest trees. Over the 4th of July weekend, Campbell hiked 10 miles across numerous trails and swam in rivers surrounded by redwood trees. “This was my first time organizing a trip with multiple interns,” Campbell said. “I’ve always loved hiking, so it was an amazing experience.”
Aerospace Engineering junior Mohammed Abdulmujeeb (Cohort 44) worked at Boeing as a Structures Intern. From collaborating with different engineering and stress analysis teams to visiting a new plane after its fourth takeoff, Abdulmujeeb explored all facets of the airplane manufacturing process. He especially enjoyed applying the foundational engineering principles he learned from his first-year Fundamental Engineering Principles class in his day-to-day work. “These principles were not simplified at all [during the course], and I would often look back to the notes I took from class; it was very informative and beneficial,” Abdulmujeeb expressed.
“Something unexpected about my internship was that it was more hands-on than I thought it would be,” Abdulmujeeb said. Most of his work consisted of solving math equations for the airplane parts he tested, but he needed to learn how to weld in order to build stronger test frames for each component. Abdulmujeeb described welding as challenging at first but “definitely a skill [he would] want to continue working on in the future.”
Outside of crunching numbers and assessing plane components, Abdulmujeeb played volleyball with his fellow interns, climbed to the peak of Mount Si, and enjoyed exploring Seattle’s variety of Vietnamese coffee and food.
Sri Suhas Chokkaku, a sophomore majoring in Aerospace Engineering (Cohort 46), spent his summer working at the Composite Research Lab led by Dr. Norman Wereley. Chokkaku explored how hollow glass microspheres and glass foam can be used in car crash protection systems to minimize the severity of head injuries pedestrians often receive during low-speed pedestrian car crashes.
Chokkaku’s major takeaway was that research is a long and iterative process. Although “eight weeks were not enough to get all of the results [he] wanted,” Chokkaku made the most of those two months by working on three main subprojects: creating an enlarged dry powder printing system, testing different combinations of composite materials and layers, and designing optimal glass foam configurations.
Chokkaku is excited to continue working with the Composite Research Lab this semester. “My summer opened my perspective towards post-graduate research, and now I have a better understanding of what that career path looks like,” Chokkaku described.
