Senior Projects

This week I spent half the time across the street at New Frontier Materials and the other half with Glenn at Fred Weber again. New Frontier Materials bought out most of Fred Weber last June so the employees from both companies still know each other well.

On Monday I spent the day with Nick who is a quality control guy for New Frontier. He took me with him to the New Melle Quarry and told me all about what types of rock go in certain cement and asphalt mixes and what the state regulates about those processes. We took some samples and brought them back to the lab to test.

On Tuesday I went with Glenn to meet with the Engineers at Hurst-Rosche Engineering firm about an issue at a quarry FW owns.

On Wednesday I worked with Glenn and Mark Denton, Vice President at Fred Weber. They gave me a little research project where I am creating a list of competitors and compiling all public data on them and their production capabilities. I basically spent the whole day doing this.

On Thursday I spent the day with Ken Kampman at New Frontier and we went down to Iron Mountain Trap Rock Quarry near Farmington, MO. We flew a drone over the to get volumes on all the stockpiles to essentially take stock of the rock that was ready to be sold and make sure that the amount that was actually there corresponded to the amount in the books.

I went into this week not really knowing the plan, but this week we got two new cows, and we finished a lot of fencing that needed to get done. We are setting up things for next week when we begin our water line project.

Now that I have a good understanding of if/else. loops, and strings. I have moved onto shap making I have not figured it out yet. I do a lot of debugging. But my next two lessions are on creating shapes so I should get better at it.

The first week was like orientation. I followed around the CEO of Craftsmen, Lou Helmsing, Lou Gave me a tour of the company and answered any big questions I had about the company. Then I got a tour of all the buildings Craftsmen owns, and the family-owned businesses which are separate from the Craftsmen, but owned by the Helmsings. I also got to go to different branches of the company and follow some of their employers around. The first week was great. I learned a lot and got to talk and connect with a bunch of people.

Quarter one drew to a close this past week, so Wednesday and Thursday were dedicated to planning this next quarter. It was surprising because even small things were getting planned for months from now. I’ve gotten to be a fly on the wall for several meetings with higher-ups in the company and it has been interesting to see the dynamics between the teams, between teams and management, and how something one person is working on ties into the company’s interest. This week was a lot of big-picture planning and learning about the company’s and Agile’s structure.

Week 1 had past and what a week it has been. I did a lot of stuff over the week. I got to meet the cows and learn about the operation. I worked with Barbed with which wasn’t very fun, and I got to take apart fences and trees. It was a great week.

Fred Weber is a company that works all types of construction projects including mining and concrete products. They actually were the company that built the overpass and intersection at Manchester and 141 but the don’t do as many roads anymore.

On Monday, I went to the Fred Weber main offices and spent the entire day watching safety videos to get myself MSHA(Mine Safety and Health Administration) approved. 

On Tuesday, I went back to the Fred Weber offices and spent the first hour finishing up my safety videos and then spent most of the morning doing volumetric calculations with Glenn O’Bryan, the General manager at Fred Weber. He is also a civil engineer and he is really generous with his time and will answer any question about civil engineering. He then took me on a tour of the Bridgeton landfill that he used to manage and the other landfill near the Hollywood casino amphitheater that Fred Weber owned up until a couple years ago. He told me all about the problems and how everything worked in the quarry and landfill and then took me on a tour of the processing area for all rock that is pulled out of the quarry. 

On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I spent my days at the Fred Weber Reinforced Concrete Plant because Glenn was out of town. I shadowed the quality control lady named Emily for all three days. In those three days I pretty much learned everything there is to know about concrete pipes and culverts. Although they are pretty simple devices it was interesting to learn about how things worked on the manufacturing line. I also got to talk with the manager of that plant who is a civil engineer. He approves the design and construction of everything they sell.

My first week, there wasn’t a whole lot of new information. Because I have had some coding experiance before, I already knew some of the basics. For the first bit I went over things like strings, if/else, and loops. All of which I have had some previous experiance with. But today I started working on how to creatate shapes. I have not done this before and it’s a bit challenging to get the hang of. But hopefuly next week I can do it with ease.

I spent a majority of the first day of my project talking to the people I was going to be working with and shadowing people in the shipping department to learn how it works. In the second half of the day I learned how to use the CNC machine in the shop.

The second day I spent the whole morning using the CNC machine to cut pieces for some of their drivetrains. The second half of the day I talked to the sales representatives at Pem racing to learn how they network and who they talk to at events and other business related events they go to.

Yesterday and today have consisted of a lot of online meetings with the team in Phoenix. I’ve gotten to learn about Agile software development methodology and how teams need to be in constant communication with one another, including interdepartmentally; rarely is anything ever worked on by just one team. I have much to learn jumping into cybersecurity which has led to a lot of research about what they are talking about. Listening to the meetings, if I don’t understand something, I can look it up and ask clarifying questions. Also, working in a corporate environment comes with a lot of emails, some of which aren’t prompt because everyone is busy.