During Summer 2011, I worked as a Robotics & Mechanical Engineering Intern at Panduit in Cumming, Georgia. Panduit is a long-running Chicago-area manufacturer (founded in 1955, headquartered in Tinley Park) with thousands of employees worldwide, and that context mattered because it exposed me to manufacturing at real industrial scale instead of classroom scale.
This internship gave me a ground-level view of how a global manufacturing operation actually runs: materials, processes, equipment, people, and decision-making all tied together. I learned about plastics, supply-chain flow, conveyor systems, extrusion-style production, warehousing, shipping/receiving, CAD documentation, and cross-functional execution inside a facility with thousands of employees across the broader organization.
Panduit · Robotics & Mechanical Engineering Internship · Cumming, Georgia · May 2011 - September 2011
The sections below cover facility flow, plastics and production, my CAD fire-protection walkdown project, and the LEAN/Six Sigma leadership lessons I carried forward.
The CAD documentation project forced me to navigate most of the building and speak with people at their stations. That changed how I think about engineering. Good designs are not only technically correct; they are understandable to operators, maintainable by teams, and resilient under real shift conditions.
Before this internship, many concepts lived as separate topics: plastics, conveyors, inventory, CAD, quality, safety, and leadership. At Panduit I saw how they compound into one operating system. That systems perspective became a lasting part of how I approach engineering work now.
Summer 2011 at Panduit was a pivotal early engineering chapter. I learned to move between drawings and reality, between process and people, and between local decisions and global operational impact. That combination of technical depth and floor-level context has stayed with me ever since.
