2022 Student Impact Award Winners
Congrats to the winners of the 2022 Student Impact Award. Below are excerpts from the nominations that were submitted by respective supervisors.
2+ Work Term Winner
Bradley Moyer
Rockwell Automation, Summer 2021, Fall 2021
What were the student's main responsibilities?
Bradley was a key contributor across multiple aspects of the design and validation of one of Rockwell's most critical new platform developments. His primary team was responsible for development of the most complex design in this platform, a software-configurable and highly available Input/Output module. As part of this team, Bradley became a primary point of contact for execution of validation testing and root cause analysis for anomalies/exceptions found in testing. His diligence, detail-oriented approach, and highly collaborative approach drove the resolution of multiple critical design analyses which resulted in critical design changes that greatly reduced risk to customer.
What is one specific accomplishment of your intern/co-op?
While executing validation testing against the design he is responsible for, Bradley identified 2 critical exceptions related to abnormal behavior of the channel power supply circuitry. He raised these to the team and subsequently owned the root-cause analysis and testing, which involved many hours in lab and in cross-disciplinary meetings to determine, implement, and validate a solution. The circuitry in this design is very complex and would not have been a task that I would normally have a co-op own, but Bradley has developed a reputation of continually impressing me with his approach and ownership of his work. The exception investigations that Bradley completed have surely saved us months of project time and in the area of tens of thousands of dollars in reworks and redesigns after the fact.
What impact did the student have on your organization?
We have been shifting to an agile development environment over the past 3 years here at Rockwell, a fundamental culture shift that requires constant collaboration and flexibility to shift quick to support "The most important things". A key contributor to the success of this transformation is having people that are selfless, are passionate about learning and developing, and carry the temperament and collaborative nature to work through dynamic and complex problems quickly. Bradley has not only contributed all of these things to his team, but has also been an advocate for our larger change, setting the example for some engineers that have many more years of professional experience. His passion for learning and willingness to be open about topics that may be above his current experience level has earned him the trust of our most well-respected team members. Aside from the person that he is and the attitude that he brings, he has also saved his team months of effort and, as a result, has saved the program that he works in multiple thousands of dollars.
What makes this student stand out among others and deserving of the Student Impact award?
I have been in charge of our hardware development co-op program for over 2 years and, many years ago, was a co-op in this same program. We generally stray from bringing in interns that have no prior experience with Rockwell Automation because the ramp-up and technical/process knowledge required to succeed in their roles usually takes around 3 months, after which we expect them to be able to own less-complex tasks/workflows. As concisely as I can say it, Bradley has completely reset this expectation for me. Within one month, Bradley was self-owning testing for an architecture that he had never seen prior to joining us, providing data-driven and concise feedback of his results. In his second month, Bradley gave a demo of his work to the entirety of our program of 100+ engineers, receiving praise from our Engineering Director and key program sponsors for the quality of content.
What three words would you use to describe this student?
Owner, Collaborator, Professional
Single Work Term Winner
Faiz Khan
Corteva Agriscience, Summer 2021
What were the student's main responsibilities?
Faiz's main responsibility was to develop a new characterization tool to extend the team's capability on understanding formulation/product properties.
What is one specific accomplishment of your intern/co-op?
In only roughly 3 months or less, Faiz has thoroughly proved the concept of this setup by building up a gadget from scratch, optimizing the gadget performance, validating the data generated by this gadget with historical knowledge, and collecting a huge amount of data for new formulations/products.
What impact did the student have on your organization?
Faiz's summer work has provided a lot of new information for the ongoing product development. In addition, his new setup will be a standard characterization method and the data generated from this setup will continue to be critical for formulation/product development.
What makes this student stand out among others and deserving of the Student Impact award?
Faiz has impressed all his Corteva colleagues (and me) with his exceptional initiatives, ownership, creativity, communication skills, execution skills and problem-solving skills. From the first day he was here, Faiz has been very much devoted in the project. He searched literatures without being asked, and independently started the collaboration work. He keeps a big picture in his mind, while solving each detailed problem one-by-one. He is a hardworking hands-on person, and at the same time he shares his creative ideas with colleagues around him. He delivered quite a few presentations to different groups of audience during his internship and each time was very well received. His great passion and leadership makes him the type of person that everyone wants to work with.
What three words would you use to describe this student?
Initiatives, creative, passionate