My Internship at New Insight Engineering
I’m a drafting technician with some design experience
I started working at New Insight around October 2022 soon after the engineering career fair. I usually don’t work much over the school year but I get a lot more hours over the summer. I’m an intern right now but I was hired with the idea that I would stay on and work after college too. I’m still not sure what field of engineering I want to get into so only time will tell.
We all mostly work from home and have a weekly team meeting. I don’t mind the work and the schedule is more flexible than anything I could have working in person. It started as a small team of just twelve people when I got hired on so we all know each other pretty well. The team has grown over the time I’ve been working for the company and now we have 19 people in the team meetings.
New Insight Engineering’s Website:
https://newinsightengineering.com/
What does New Insight Do?
We design protection systems and SCADA for substations
New Insight Engineering is an engineering firm that specializes in substation SCADA and protection. We design and draft the drawings that construction companies use to build or retrofit substations. We also do field work ourselves and some team members exclusively work in the field for parts of the year. These substations could go into service on the wider grid or could be for a specific business. Companies like Nipsco, Comed, and Sargent & Lundy commission us to do a project and we design and draft it for them.
The amount of work we have fluctuates throughout the year because of this and I’m only really needed during the peak times. They know I have school to worry about so I have a light load. During the summer I have more time to work on complex projects. Anthony Ortiz is the President/Principal Engineer and I initially met him at the Valparaiso career fair. We are exclusively a ‘work from home’ company with everyone being provided with a computer for work and camera/microphone to communicate. We mostly communicate with Microsoft Teams but we do have weekly meetings to learn new things or provide updates.
What I do as a CAD Technician?
Most of my work comes from drafting for the design engineers
Our design engineers have limited time, so they provide drafters like me with rough sketches outlining their requirements. It’s my responsibility to refine these sketches and enhance their visual appeal. I’ll be given a rough markup pdf and/or instructions and I have to edit the drawing in AutoCAD to fit those requirements. This process requires communication between the engineer and I to ensure that the drawing is correct. Once I’ve captured all the markups from the engineer’s pdf, I’ll “reprint” the drawing as a pdf for review. The review process starts with a backcheck of my own work. I’ll go through and highlight all the parts I edited to make sure they are correct. I’ll then print another set of drawings so the engineer can check my work. I’ll make any changes they bring to me and then we submit it to the customer. This process might go back and forth a few times but eventually we end up with a finalized copy that we submit for constriction.
My Physical Design Experience
Drafting isn’t very complex but I’ve also done some physical design
Last summer New Insight give me some design work for substations requiring a battery replacement. Replacing the batteries often required replacement of racks, wiring, disconnects, chargers and many other components involved. I often had to consult manuals of the different components to find dimensions and other specifications. This all culminated in creating the BOM for the site where I would list all the required components as well as the calculated conduit/wire lengths from my design. The required cable gauge changes based on the length of the wire so I needed to run all the numbers to make sure my system would be safe. I received a lot of help and backchecks from the other engineers to ensure this too. Overall I did the design, and created the BOM for 15 sites that summer.
Wiring Experience
Since I live close to my boss’s house, he invited me to do some panel wiring for him
I got hired at New Insight because of the experience I had building projects. I didn’t have any grades in the grade book when I did the interview for the position. I only had my project resume to show my ability. This benefited me because it showed that I could be useful for wiring projects like the panel above. Over the course of a week I wired two of these panels for a company training demo. I needed to reference a wiring diagram to make all the connections for this SEL-351S relay. The relay also has protection fuses, LEDs, and a bunch of terminal blocks. I used a multimeter to backcheck all my wiring.
Conclusion
I’ve learned so much about the grid from working at New Insight and I’m sure they have much more to teach me!
I’m grateful to be an intern at New Insight Engineering because I feel like I’m really making a difference. We have a small team so I’m really depended on to do my work well. I’m inspired to learn and do well because my team needs me to. I’ve learned drafting and design in AutoCAD and MicroStation. I was taught all about how the grid works and how it is protected. I’ve learned about the components that make up a substation and how some of them are wired. Overall I’ve learned that I have a lot more to learn about the innerworkings of substations. I’m certain that New Insight will take me there and make me the best engineer I can be!