“My mother teaches chemistry in the Frederick County Public School system. My Father is a bioengineer. My sister is studying pharmacy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB). Finally, I’m studying mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. I guess you could say that STEM careers run in the family.”
So offers Emma Chang, a design engineering intern in the Design Engineering Department at Phoenix Mecano. This is Emma’s first internship, and while the experience offers challenges, they’re the kind any intern “entering the workforce” might face. Emma: “This being my first internship, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was not used to reaching out to others for help and taking the initiative on projects with co-workers that had so much experience. It’s also the first time I had to consider the manufacturability of my designs.”
That said, Emma is no stranger to the design game. “I’ve enjoyed math and science since I was young,” she says, “but it wasn’t until I started participating in extracurricular STEM competitions, from elementary school through high school, that I figured out how much I really like to design things and problem-solve.” Those STEM competitions included Destination Imagination, Science Olympiad, and MATHCOUNTS. In high school, she tutored students after school in math and science. She was also an instructor at Mathnasium of Frederick North. As for college, Emma’s now an active member of UMDLoop: the University of Maryland’s Mars Rover Team, which is competing internationally against other teams in the University Rover Challenge.
Emma: “On the UMDLoop team I’m a member of the science subteam, which is responsible for building autonomous soil-sampling and soil-testing systems. We use SolidWorks, a type of CAD software, to model and design our systems.”
As a design engineering intern at Phoenix Mecano, Emma’s typical day looks something like this: After arriving at 7:30 AM, she checks her email and Teams notifications before seeing what’s on the day’s agenda. There’s a sprint meeting with the design and application engineering group at 9:00 AM, and then she gets on with the day’s main tasks: “Usually, I have a project where there are a lot of independent parts for me to work and think on, and then also many collaborative parts. An example of this would be my most recent project: making training videos, where I needed to work with various people from all over the building to learn about the topics we’d be covering and to get the content I needed. After lunch, I attend design reviews, work on 3D printing, and do as much training as I can on SolidWorks.”
If there’s ever been a person designed to have an immersive interest in a STEM-related field, it’s Emma Chang. And if there’s ever been a company designed to foster and nurture such native talent, and in the process help it reach its fullest expression, it’s Phoenix Mecano. Again, Emma: “The culture of Phoenix Mecano is a very friendly and inviting one. Everyone is welcoming and helpful, and the internship offers a lot of exposure that brings a working-reality to everything I’ve learned so far in my life. I enjoy experiencing all the stages of production: from the beginning of a project to the design, and from the design to the production piece. The best discussions are where we work through the design, consider manufacturability, and then finalize it. I’m incredibly fortunate to have a front-row seat to this talented group of people doing a job I hope to do someday.”
