The Materials Science & Engineering Department encourages our students to explore outside the classroom. When you live in a world of materials the classroom is literally is all around us. 

A number of our students spend their summers in internship positions applying what they learned during the academic year. Whether it’s out of state or in state our students have found their internships pivotal in deciding what their next step is after graduation.

2012 MSE Summer Interns

Melinda Downs

Melinda is a senior in the Materials Science & Engineering program.  She did a summer internship with Northrop Grumman in Clearfield, Utah.  Northrop Grumman is the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBN) Prime Team.   She worked on the environmental and corrosion team and was also invited to attend a conference in Minot, South Dakota.   She had lots of corrosion to evaluate while working with the team. Melinda highly recommends doing an internship.  She feels it gives a student the opportunity to see how you will like doing research or if another area of engineering would be of more interest.

Mats Hanson

Mats is a senior in the Materials Science & Engineering program.  He worked at the Sullivan Park Campus, Corning New York working with research teams testing to predict materials properties during the extrusion of cellular wear (catalytic converter substrate).  Mats loved the hands on experience and was proud to show his employer that students from the University of Utah know how to get research results.

Marc Warren

Marc is a senior in the Materials Science & Engineering program.  He worked with a Research Engineer at Ceramatec in Salt Lake gathering data to be used in the process and development to completely reformulate the composition and processing of the oxygen wafers for oxygen ion membrane products.  Marc was amazed at the amount of data and the analyses of graphs and tables are necessary in order to make decisions that would affect the future of the product.  “Being an intern gave me the opportunity to work in a “real world” research atmosphere and what options you have in your professional career choices”.

Quintin Parry

Quintin is a junior in the Materials Science & Engineering program.  His internship was at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.  He worked with the materials joining group and was assigned a laser cleaning evaluation.  NASA currently uses the friction-stir welding process which requires extensive cleaning of the pre-weld surfaces.  Quintin worked with two companies General Lasertronics and Adapt Laser Systems to have a set of panels cleaned using laser ablation.  The team then evaluated the weld strength and used the data to determine how effective the process had been and other tests that need or should be run.  He expressed how important his materials background was and how his course in Intro to Ceramics was particularly useful for this internship. Quintin was invited back to spend summer 2013 working with NASA, which he enthusiastically accepted.

Tyler Hafen

Tyler is a senior in the Materials Science & Engineering program.  His internship was at Ceramatec in Salt Lake working on designing a replacement joining tape material to join parts for a high output oxygen pump: batched slips from base powders and tape cast those slips to product the material, characterized our materials using  SEM, SAM, Instron (mechanical properties), etc. and analyzed the quality of joints after actually joining parts and firing (sintering) them.  Tyler felt that he learned from hands on experience in the research lab and was able to put his class room studies to use actually doing research.  It was an important extension of what a professional engineer is expected to know and how to perform in a research environment.  He also understood how important interacting and collaborating with other researchers and their respective disciplines is to reach a common goal.