Co-op at United Taconite

As a student at IRE I have had the unique opportunity to have a three semester long “co-op” as a reliability engineer with United Taconite. I am going to graduate at the end of fall semester 2012, and then continue to work in this position at United Taconite. In my first semester in this co-op, I have been required to write documents on the different steps in the design process, as every student at IRE does every semester. The main difference here is when on a project team working on a project at IRE, the team collaborates to create this document, and it is written on the one semester long project they are working on. As a reliability engineer, I do not work on large, many months long projects. They are much smaller in scale. They also do not appear to fallow the design process. In the beginning of the semester I did not know how I was going to do this. After a few projects, I tried to sort them out and apply different steps of the design to the different projects. This is the method in which I wrote most of the documents needed at IRE. Through this writing, and putting them all together into a technical report I made a discovery. A small project done by a reliability engineer does fit the design process! It was not at all intuitive, but through a lot of reflection and drawing relationships I found it to fit quite well. This got me thinking about how versatile this process really is. It can be applied to almost anything. Not every problem uses all of the steps, but this process is a logical way to approach any issue or problem. The scope can be years or it can be days, either way the design process still applies.