Chemical Engineering Internship with Taylor Underwood

My name is Taylor Underwood and I am a senior in Chemical Engineering. I have been working with an industrial gas company called Air Liquide for the past two summers, first as a gas plant operations intern and last summer as a project engineering intern. My first summer with this company was my first real introduction to what chemical engineers really do in industry. Working in a plant, a chemical engineer must be ready to do whatever it takes to keep the plant running even though the overall goal is almost always process optimization. I created a computer-generated simulation to update the cooling water piping around the plant. I scoped a project for implementing a new flow meter on one of the Nitrogen pipelines. This involved working with the electrician, the computer programmer, and the maintenance technicians. During the summer I was there, the plant was going through a turnaround where a lot of maintenance and updates happen. While the equipment was being worked on I got to climb a 30-meter-tall distillation column and look inside all the industrial sized heat exchangers and compressors. This was a great experience for me because I was able to see all of the machines that I had been learning about in class but had never actually seen before in person.

This past summer I was working in Houston as a project engineering intern. One of the databases that is used to track maintenance work was ineffective because workers were not using the database as intended. This led to inorganized and missing information. It was my job to collect all the information we did have, figure out what was missing, find out where the issues were in the database and reorganize the data in a more user-friendly way. This led to me handling and reorganizing over eight thousand documents. In July I was sent to their worldwide headquarters in Paris, France. Twenty-four other students from over twenty-one different countries were sent there as well to learn more about the company and to work on a marketing focused business case for them. We were also able to visit different manufacturing plants to learn more about the process of liquifying and separating air into its components, and then what those different materials would be used for. It was amazing to hear about the different backgrounds and lifestyles of all my peers!

Overall, I have really enjoyed all of the opportunities that being a chemical engineering student at Purdue has given me! After graduation I plan on beginning a rotational program where I can get more experience in different plant settings before settling in a more permanent position.