UT Arlington College of Engineering
UT Arlington

Student Profile – Mary Campbell
An Internship Demonstrates Ingenuity

May was a productive month for Mary Campbell. That’s when she received a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering and also learned that her work during an internship had resulted in improvements for her employer. Major improvements.

Until a year before, Mary had been waiting tables at Red Lobster, working her way through college. Then she got an internship with the A.E. Petsche Company in Arlington, a manufacturer of aircraft electrical connector assemblies. Mary was given the task of evaluating and improving Petsche’s manufacturing, warehousing and shipping process. Petsche’s workforce had expanded to two shifts to meet contract requirements and the operational facilities were at their limits.

Mary studied the many areas needing improvements and created computer simulations of possible changes. As a result of her ideas, warehouse and manufacturing operations were reorganized. Her collaboration helped the assembly shop to increase production from 2400 parts per day to more than 4500 over a 15-month period.

Now Mary has taken a new challenge. She’s a graduate research assistant working on a microreactor process to produce biodiesel fuel from agricultural sources, a process that should lead to a dramatic increase in supply and decrease in cost. This project is on schedule for the December introduction of a demonstration unit.  

“This project has given me a new appreciation for research in general,” she said. “I’m working with professors in different fields, applying academic theories to real-world solutions and applications.” In an offshoot of this project, Mary is also doing cost models to determine the feasibility of using the microreactor process to liquefy Texas lignite coal to create heavy crude oil. This, too, should lead to an increase of supply and decrease in cost of gasoline and other fuels.

When she receives her master’s degree, Mary hopes to continue her work in an energy-related field, possibly with a manufacturer of wind energy products. With her record of initiative and success, she shouldn’t have any problem fulfilling those expectations.