Off-Cycle Internship in Seattle = Road Trip!

Wow, it's been a while. During and after plant trek things got pretty hectic, and as a result my blogging has lacked significantly.  However, it's time for an update.

A lot has happened really. As many of you probably know, part of LGO is a 6 month internship with one of the partner companies, and the research done on this internship serves as the basis for your engineering thesis.  Most people tend to do their internship "on-cycle", which means it starts after spring semester and ends around the end of November, and then only one semester of classes remain until graduation and the professional world.  However, a portion of each class also does their internship "off-cycle", meaning it starts at the beginning of February and ends sometime in August.  Various partner companies offer off-cycle internships, and about 20% or so of the class will take one of these internships.  It's completely up to the student whether or not they want to apply for off-cycle, and there are various different benefits/drawbacks to either option. Some course offerings are only possible if you go off-cycle (and vice-versa), off-cycle internships allow you to be back on campus for all of Sloan recruiting (although there are plenty of recruiting options for on-cycle as well), and you get a break from classwork  after two semesters.  As well, some companies only offer off-cyle internships, and some only offer on-cycle, so it's good to start thinking about your game-plan and what you want to do for your internship soon after arriving on-campus.

With that long-winded explanation (and as evidenced by the title), I'm doing my internship off-cycle with Amazon in Seattle.  For me it came down to the company/industry, internship project, and location. I worked for Caterpillar (also a partner company) prior to LGO, and for my internship I wanted to work on something different from my prior experience, to broaden my horizons and give me exposure to something outside of large, steel-cutting manufacturing.  Don't get me wrong - I love heavy manufacturing, equipment, and everything that comes with it - but I wanted to try something new.  As well, the project I'm working on is very interesting, and my wife and I thought it would be fun to live in Seattle for 6 months or so (we're finding it's quite rainy, but beautiful when the sun shines!).

In order to get to here, however, we had to drive across all of the purple mountains majesties and above the fruited plain.  And while the trip was largely uneventful, the first of February is not the ideal time to spend any considerable amount of time in Fargo, North Dakota.  Coast-to-coast in a few short days was a marathon of a trip, but it's what made sense for us.  We left almost all of our stuff in storage back in Cambridge, and have found some cheap things second-hand.  Some people will rent furniture, and others will take their stuff with them, it really just depends on the situation.

One of the highlights of the road trip was the picture above, we saw a 737 fuselage on a train headed to Boeing (another partner company) in Seattle!  It was coming from Spirit Aerosystems (yet another partner), and it was awesome to see this part of a supply chain, in the flesh and right next to the freeway!  I had just seen these planes being assembled at Boeing as part of our plant trek, so this was especially awesome for me.  I was notably more excited than my wife (although she did think it was cool to see, it's not every day you see a big green airplane being pulled by a locomotive), so she was forced to take the picture because I was driving.  She calls me a nerd, but it's okay - operations nerdity is encouraged at LGO.