Designing, building, and making are great, but breaking is even better. In each step in my personal, professional, and academic life, I've become better at testing the world around me. One of the best breaking, testing, and fixing tools I've used so far, was a slow, unreliable, and poorly tuned FDM printer in 2014. It started my path in many ways; It showed me a simple and effective application of robotics in manufacturing, an idea that grew into my graduate study concentration. In high school, I read Make Magazine to see the Form 1 and 2 regularly take the annual prize in resin, wondering if my school could get one. Now, I am excited to apply for an engineering internship with Formlabs because I have a background that can help every realm of this innovative company, especially in mechanical design and testing.

 

        Starting in a two-man machine shop and a packaging machine manufacturer, I learned that neither I, nor anyone else, should have to do manual, repetitive, hard manufacturing where automation is a reasonable alternative. I also learned how to safely use manual and CNC mills and lathes, hand drills, files, wire terminating, soldering, pneumatics, and more. I'd talk with machine operators and find their pain points, made simple tools to help them temporarily, and proposed systematic changes to my manager. I enjoyed breaking their production line down and finding the root solution. Each day, I'd be colored orange from steel dust that had rusted in my sweat.
‍
        Seeing the real need for intelligent use of automation, I developed, tested, and applied robotic sensors, tool changers, and other end effectors at ATI Industrial Automation.  I thrived in their lab designing SolidWorks electromechanical assemblies, safety improvements, and testing rigs, then running those same rigs for over 1 million simulated uses. I worked with test technicians to find safety and production issues. Completing a GD&T and safety review for one of my designs was a terrifying and exhilarating experience. I was very happy in a culture that valued safety and innovation above all else, and your employee reviews show me that I will find the same at Formlabs.

        During my last day at ATI Industrial Automation, my manager gave me a hockey puck-sized force/torque sensor and told me to "Go do some cool research with it." I took up the challenge and found a disused robot arm in a professor's garage. With his help, we got it up and running, but its positional accuracy was poor. This was because the kinematic constants, used in math to know where it is, were either lost or had low precision. I designed and machined interface plates to mount the sensor to the robot, as a source of positional truth when it feels that it touched a surface. I applied forward and inverse kinematic analysis to find where the robot thought it was and where it actually was, all calculated in a Python GUI. I analyzed hundreds of data points and described my findings with mechanical, electrical, and kinematics SMEs.
‍
        On multiple occasions, I have found great pride in showing my (or my group's) analysis, and all of its flaws, in formal reviews. The people of Formlabs are very accustomed to showing their work to investors with the future of the company on the line. As a teaching assistant for three semesters of capstone design courses, I have helped more than twenty student groups deliver end-of-term technical reports and presentations with a high focus on clarity, conciseness, and accuracy. I have made so many design renderings in SolidWorks and data visualizations in Python that I needed to create a website portfolio to show the best ones. It was a rewarding experience; learning the basics of HTML/JS/CSS pushed me creatively and coding for tall phones gave me inspiration for a two-column résumé. I hope you like it.

        All of my technical design, analysis, testing, and communication skills were refined this summer at Sandia National Laboratories, where they test anything, especially nuclear devices. As a part of the Technical Security Systems team, I took a mechanical rig that tested RFID badge swipes and added a simulated door opening and closing to each, using a servo motor and gearbox. I proposed, prototyped, designed, purchased, manufactured, and tested the assembly before presenting the results to supervisors and managers. They were very satisfied with the decisions made and are using the assembly to evaluate the security of our nation's most valuable buildings. Formlabs is seeking engineers with a high ability to individually contribute to a large engineering team, and I believe that this summer I did just that.

        In graduate school, I have taken on multiple projects related to my passion for 3D printing and robotics. As a project engineer and controls advisor, I am guiding a twenty-student team to make a six-axis robotic arm that has a filament nozzle on the end, enabling printing in any direction. The group has a small startup feeling where we're very hungry to see the technology work, and if it's good enough, there will be a market for it. I've also completed a small research project on printing variations caused by changing an extruder gear's geometry to be triangular, square, or octagonal... anything but circular. It was a fun project, and it helped me learn how to conduct research in a short period.

 

        I am excited and concerned to know that automated manufacturing and testing will break everything. Exploitative and hazardous manufacturing jobs will break from economic pressure. Poor tools will break from obsolescence. Sour opinions will break from easy use. From improving a machine shop to testing in a national laboratory and beyond, I continue to create tools, robots, and printers to break, analyze, and fix a part of this world. I hope to join you in this constantly originative company of breakers this winter in Somerville.

 

Thank you for your consideration,