Summer Happenings in OSUMaterials

While our students are busy with summer jobs, internships, and classes, here are a few things going on in the department this summer.

The OSU’s Women in Engineering program holds a variety of outreach camps throughout the summer.  One group of rising high school seniors stopped by Dr. Guan’s lab in the MSE Department to learn about the use of polymer gels, stem cells, and the regeneration of heart tissue.  Here, students inject stem cells mixed in a polymer hydrogel (liquid at low temperatures, and more solid at body temperature) into a pig heart.  Read more about Dr. Jianjun Guan’s work here: Hydrogels for Cardiac Tissue Engineering.

Women in Engineering campers learn about biomaterials

In addition, the department acquired a new “toy” that will be used in classes and welding demonstrations to show a type of solid state welding called “cold pressure welding.” The hand-held device welds wire pieces together without the use of heat. Forcing two wires through a die several times, exposes pure areas of metal (copper, in this video) to come in close contact with each other, so that metallic bonding occurs.

In this video, visiting high school teachers learn about materials and solid state welding at an ASM Materials Teachers camp held in the department this summer.

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What are you doing this summer?

This summer -

MSE Students are interning at: Owens Corning,General Motors, Oshkosh Corporation,DNV Columbus,Steel Dynamics Inc,Honda,Nuclear Regulatory Commision,The Ohio State University Department of Nuclear Engineering, Hendrickson Trailer Suspension Systems, Marathon Petroleum, Ridge Tool Co., Entrotech, HA International, Emerson Climate Technologies, The Timken Company, Swagelok, TIMET, Unilever, UES, Inc.

MSE students are doing: Materials & Process Engineering Intern, Lab maintenance, material evaluation, failure analysis research, steel manufacturing, Engines engineer , Manufacturing, Student Engineer, not sure yet, Student Researcher, Research, Metallurgical Intern,   Research with some manufacturing, Metallury Co-op, Maintenance and Inspection, Metallurgical Engineering, Product Engineering, research, manufacturing, material selection, Composites Design, Carbon fiber research, Purchasing Division Associate, Lab assistant, Quality control/development, data analysis, metallurgical work, research, Composites sourcing intern, buying and shipping parts from other companies, Sheet and Plate Metallurgist, Manufacturing

MSE students are making per hour average: $16.94

Have a happy summer, everyone!

Research Internships – REUs

Research Experiences for Undergraduates – REUs – are summer alternatives to traditional work internships.  Instead of working for a company in industry for a summer, undergraduate students are matched with university research groups, working alongside graduate students and their supervising professors on a specific projects.

Students in their sophomore and junior years, who are considering graduate school are encouraged to apply.  Normal application deadlines for summer positions are February-March.

Jackie at UC-Santa Barbara.

Most REUs are funded by the National Science Foundation – NSF, and are hosted by universities across the country.

• What’s in it for the universities?  They get you on their campus to consider them for grad school.
• What’s in it for you?  Usually, 10 weeks of paid research, housing, travel, and an incredible summer with college students from around the globe.

Read here about MSE senior Jackie Ohmura, and her summer REU at UC-Santa Barbara.

For more information about NSF-sponsored REUs, visit this site: http://www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/reu/reu_search.cfm

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Metal Casting and NASA

This story aired last year, but WOSU-TV has repackaged it for broadcast on The Big Ten Network.  Worth repeating here, too.

Viva Titanium!

From OSU Materials Science and Engineering senior Adam Y.

I have been interning at TIMET (Titanium Metals Corporation) Technical Laboratory, the research and development facilities located in Henderson, Nevada. TIMET is a large titanium producer that supplies titanium for aerospace, automotive, consumer goods, and biomedical applications.

The internship has been great. TIMET has been flexible in letting me take projects in the direction I want. I have worked on research projects that apply to developing new alloys, implementing procedures for new nondestructive testing equipment, and investigative characterization on problematic titanium produced in the production facility.

I live in central Las Vegas right next to UNLV with two students who are working and taking classes. I can’t imagine being in a better location to see everything that I want to in Las Vegas. A few blocks up I frequent a Taqueria that hosts bands a few nights a week. I also play sand volleyball, dodge ball, or whatever is being organized by some of the students that I have met.

Las Vegas is surrounded by mountains that offer mountain biking and hiking year round. They have high enough elevations to have ski slopes during the winter and into spring. So far this summer I have been hiking, biking, tubing on Lake Mead, and I got the chance to stay a weekend in a cabin in the mountains in southern California.

Spending the summer interning at this company and living in this city has been one of the best summers that I’ve spent away from college. I feel privileged to have had this experience and I hope this encourages some students to think about interning at TIMET in the future.