Our student this week is Sarah Combee, below and at right, a nuclear engineering major who accepted an internship at Duke Energy located in Tyron, North Carolina. Combee describes the department she worked in and what her main responsibilities were.
“I worked in the Reactor Primary Systems group in the Engineering department at Harris Nuclear Plant,” said Combee. “I compiled test data to help system engineers with trending, and I was very involved in pre-outage project management for a couple projects. In the project management realm I made sure that pre-outage milestone deadlines were met, figured out temp power requirements, wrote scopes of work and single source documents for contract requisition, as well as formed a recovery plan and found parts required for the project from the nuclear industry when we realized they wouldn’t be at the plant in time.”
Combee appreciated the challenging work she was given during her co-op assignment.
“I was exposed to roles I didn’t expect in engineering, and I really feel like I got to experience life as a plant engineer,” she said. “By taking an internship with Duke Energy, I was able to sample my industry and see what ownership an engineer in the nuclear field takes in their work.”