I worked as a manufacturing engineering intern on the Design for Manufacturing team at Cessna in Wichita, Kansas. My main project was developing a product to help line workers perform tasks in blind areas such as riveting or sealing inside the aircraft wings, where workers otherwise had to operate by feel or bend into awkward positions just to see what they were doing.

I started by talking directly with the line employees to understand what features they actually wanted, to make sure the final product would be something they'd genuinely use rather than something that looked good on paper but got ignored on the floor.

The final design was a wireless camera that suctions to the interior wing panels and streams video to a mobile display, letting workers see what they're doing in spaces they otherwise couldn't view directly.

This project pushed me to develop skills I hadn't used much before: customer discovery and outreach, more advanced 3D-printing design work, designing under tight size constraints to fit inside the wing cavities, and designing specifically around what our in-house manufacturing capabilities could actually produce.

I was asked by my manager to not show the tool design, and am unable to show any photos of it here.

Internship Photo

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