hope begins here - College of Engineering - Oregon State University

Continuing the story
Solving the real
problems
One of the things Julia
Petersen likes most about
her job as a validation
engineering manager
at Intel in Hillsboro is
communication. “What
interests me most about
my position is the
opportunity to work across different
departments to improve products and
processes,” Petersen says.
It takes teamwork
Petersen manages a group that
tests motherboards, which means
she needs to coordinate her team’s
efforts with several other teams.
For example, she works with the
developers of the Basic Input/Output
System (BIOS) software necessary
to run those motherboards to know
which features are available in each
BIOS and that the software will be
delivered to her team on time.
Balancing her team’s deadlines with
those of the BIOS team takes good
communication skills. “You’re forced
to confront any introversion you have
and put it behind you,” she says.
And Petersen is successful; her
interactions with teams in hardware
engineering, design validation,
materials and quality assurance
are key to running her own group
smoothly.
Internships established the
foundation
The 1988 graduate credits her
internship experiences with providing
a foundation for those skills. “It gave
me the initial experience necessary in
teamwork and relationship building,”
she says.
Not only that, both of her internships
gave her real-world engineering
experience. At the food processing
company Lamb-Weston, Petersen
redesigned workstations for better
throughput, eliminating line waste
when it occurred, and discovering the
reason for a high nitrogen count in
wastewater.
At her second internship, Petersen
wrote a program that helped
Weyerhaeuser track the use of a
processing chemical on wood chips
that had been sorted by size. Her
program helped Weyerhaeuser realize
how much money and resources it
saved by sorting the chips. Even as
an intern, she was the lead on all of
these projects.
Mentoring today’s interns
Recognizing the value of internship
experience, Petersen has served
on the MECOP board of directors,
and she’s also brought a number of
interns to Intel.
“MECOP interns are given real work.
They need to complete real projects,”
Petersen says. “This program is by far
the best I’ve seen for giving students
experience in the workplace and
expanding their education.”
Valuing versatility
Todd Ittershagen, vice
president of Precision
Castparts Corp., a
Fortune 500 company in
Portland, thinks one of
two things can make a
good manager: the kind
of curriculum offered
in OSU’s industrial and
manufacturing engineering program,
or the kind of person who decides
to major in it. Either way, flexibility
is key.
“When we look for industrial and
manufacturing engineers, we’re
looking at people who understand
metallurgic, productivity and
financial issues,” says Ittershagen,
who is responsible for operations
at three smaller companies within
Precision Castparts. His engineers
need to understand how to do things
faster and which products to buy
that will cut down on costs. They
constantly need to be looking for
problems and solving them. And
on top of that, they need good
communication skills to tie all of
those tasks together.
Internship leads to job offer
Ittershagen started at Precision
Castparts, which makes metal
forgings, fasteners and castings
primarily for the aerospace industry,
as a MECOP student in 1990. His first
tasks were performing efficiency and
productivity studies on the factory
floor, as well as doing design work
on facility expansion and equipment
placement. He was offered a job
even before he graduated with
an industrial and manufacturing
engineering degree in 1990.
A progressive career
Since then, Ittershagen has done
equipment work, direct supervision,
quality assurance work and design
casting. He’s moved to Michigan,
Virginia, Nevada and Ohio before
coming back to Oregon. “It’s been
quite a progression the past 18
years,” he says. “Precision is an
interesting, fast-paced, progressive
company. Every time I’ve thought of
moving on, they’ve offered me more
responsibility.”
In the future, Ittershagen plans on
working more with MECOP, which
he says not only prepared him for
his work at Precision Castparts, but
also marketed him and provided him
with a network of contacts that is
useful even today. “It’s an excellent
program,” he says. “We want to
work with them so we can create a
constant stream of new, fresh people
at our company.”
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