Student Stories
Chemical Engineering Co-Op Story: Smurfit-WestRock
Todd Zirlott
Chemical Engineering
What company did you intern with and where are they located?
Smurfit-WestRock
How did you identify and apply for your internship? Are there any specific resources you used to find the opportunity (i.e. Handshake, career fairs, other recruitment events)?
TAPPI interest meetings, Handshake and Auburn Career Fairs
What was the application process like?
Applied online after attending an interest meeting. Proceeded to connect with recruiters at career fair and had an interview.
Tell us about your internship experience. What types of tasks and projects did you engage in? Was there a particular project or part of the experience you learned the most from?
Participated in process controls projects, logic implementation, controls systems and equipment checkout, shutdown involvement and shadowing, PLC auditing and logic creation, instrumentation tagging and control settings configuration, and DCS communications scaling and assigning (Emerson DeltaV).
In what ways did this internship help you prepare for your next destination after Auburn?
Provided insight into the interdisciplinary nature of the engineering career, gave me experience with chemical processes and equipment, as well as familiarization with thermodynamic and fluid phenomena in a work environment.
In what ways did your coursework or other experiences at Auburn prepare you for your internships? Are there specific topics or skills you learned from classes that you put into practice on the job?
Practice with programs like Excel and Matlab, experience in programming and logical thinking, and calculations pertinent to chemical processes are all from my classwork that I use often in my work during my co-op terms.
Do you have any advice for other students looking for internships like yours?
Involvement and investigation are important. Get involved with student groups pertinent to the work you want to pursue and the discipline you study. Also take advantage of school events such as career fairs, interest meetings, and online services designed to make connections in the industry. Expose yourself to more and more of these opportunities, if even just to gain confidence with the process. I started as a freshman and I attribute my consistency to the opportunities I gained later on.