Towards the end of my senior year at Columbia Falls High School, I was approached by my professor, Dr. Dan Letzow, asking me If I would be interested in an internship working with Solidworks. This internship was at ClassOne Technology in Kalispell, Montana. I told him that I was definitely interested in it as I wanted to see other places where CAD is used.
Dr. Dan and I took a tour of one of the buildings and it was really cool to see the tools that make wafers that are used in so many different applications in our day-to-day lives. When I started the internship, I did not really understand the process that went on to create the wafers, however, that would change as I continued to see the parts both virtually and directly by helping in the lab and seeing the machines up close.
Working here has been amazing and everyone was really understanding when I broke my foot. They were very understanding; working around doctor appointments and moving me to the other building so it would not be as far of a drive for me.
Towards the end of the summer, as I was healing, they let me sit in on engineering meetings about developing new tools. It was really cool to see exactly what goes on in the development of new ideas and all the different ideas that are put out there and discussed to see which one or combination of ideas will work the best with the constraints put out for it to work.
Between using a program that I enjoy and seeing the complete process that engineers go through to bring an idea to fruition coming right out of high school was really awesome. I have enjoyed working here at ClassOne as an intern this summer. This is an amazing place to work and has given me extremely valuable real-world experience right out of high school and into the beginning of college.
