Having the opportunity to intern at KCI over the summer has allowed me to gain an overall realistic perspective of what it is like to work in the civil engineering field. I was able to gain experience not only within the engineering side of KCI, but also in the administrative side of things.
The administrative/business portion of engineering is something that is not extensively touched on within the curriculum at Villanova, so being able to work with the various admin departments, including safety, marketing, HR, CorpCom, and IT, allowed me to view the civil engineering field from a different angle that I otherwise would not have been exposed to through my classes at school.
My experience this summer has definitely given me a new outlook on both my schoolwork and my future. During my freshman year at Villanova, all of the engineering students were required to take an intro class that was supposed to introduce us to the different assets embedded within civil engineering, and I feel that I didn’t really get a firm grasp on what course track I wanted to follow. Now that I have been given a taste of what all the different civil engineering practices actually do, I will be able to tailor my future course schedule towards the disciplines that I found most interesting and can see myself pursuing a career in after college. I feel that being able to job shadow someone who is actually in the field definitely trumps any class that you could take at school.
I really enjoyed interning at KCI the entire time I was here. From the first day I started, everyone that I met and talked to was so nice, relaxed, and willing to talk about their experiences in engineering and elsewhere. Looking back, if I could change one thing about my internship experience, I would have added more job shadowing/engineering days because I really enjoyed the weekly job shadows where I was able to see what a typical day in the life of an engineer entails. I would definitely recommend interning at KCI to any engineering student.