Engineering: THE COOLEST MAJOR!!!!!

Hello! My name is Kathleen Prilutski and I am a sophomore in mechanical and nuclear engineering at Penn State. Wow, I honestly cannot even believe that an entire year has already gone by. This time last year, I was had just graduated high school and was at the beach with my friend in the Outer Banks and was absolutely terrified and excited to go to college. My sister was already in college so my parents fixated on my every move. However, I never really realized how different college would be from high school. In high school, I was pretty active in all the running sports, including cross country, and indoor and outdoor track, which required daily practice putting me on a scheduled regime.  While you take classes and do homework in college, I no longer had a simple schedule. The class schedule remained the same but the amount of time I had to put forth in a class to do well was much greater than it was in high school. Both my parents are chemical engineers and they constantly told me that college would be much more difficult than anything I had ever done in high school. After experiencing my freshman year, I can firmly agree with this statement. While classes became more difficult, I became much better organized with my time as I realized that I wanted to have fun on the weekend with my friends, which enabled me play kickball with my friends in a racquetball court or going to football games.

Not only did I learn to better manage my time for class, but I also became actively involved with several clubs on campus. Even though I was just a freshman, I was the Society of Women Engineers’ blood drive chair, helping to coordinate blood drives on campus. I also became active with THON by canning and attending meetings for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).  Participating in THON activities were so much fun and I became good friends with the people that were also active. Overall, I highly suggest joining any club that you are interested in on campus because you can meet really great people that can turn out to be some of your closest friends.

Right now, I am working as a summer intern at American Biltrite (ABI), a tape company. One of our biggest competitors is 3M, the makers of scotch tape. Working for ABI has been a great experience for me. Even though I just finished my fifth week, with the help of many through countless emails and conversations in the production plant, I have already determined a reasoning for a problem the company has had that had been occurring for over three years. I am extremely excited about this data because this might actually help in the quality of the adhesive. It was truly amazing that my analysis and data collecting actually made a difference. Despite being the only person under the age of twenty, I became friends with people at work. I will not lie, the first day I was absolutely petrified of everyone because the majority of people were middle-age men. Instead of sitting in my office, terrified of all the new people I went around talking to different people. In the end, this was the most beneficial thing I could have ever done because the people I spoke with helped a great deal through all my testing, supplying me data and showing me around the plant. With this internship, I realized how powerful a background in engineering truly is and that I definitely want to be an engineer.