Engineering major wins state-wide internship honors
Hackworth is only the third Penn State student—and second Penn State Behrend student—to win PennACE JoAnne Day Award
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Donald Hackworth, a senior electrical engineering/computer engineering dual major in the School of Engineering and Engineering Technology at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, has received University and state-wide awards for his summer internship experience–and a job offer at Westinghouse that grew out of a tour he led for a prospective student. For his internship, Hackworth was honored with the 2004-2005 Anita M. Todd Internship Student of the Year Award given by the Penn State Engineering Cooperative Education and Professional Internship Program, and the 2005 Pennsylvania Association of Colleges and Employers (PennACE) JoAnne Day Student of the Year Award. Hackworth is only the third Penn State student to win the JoAnne Day Award for excellence in an internship program, and the second from the engineering program at Penn State Behrend. Ryan Brewer, also an electrical engineering major, received the honor in 2001; he currently is employed at Impact Technologies in State College. |
Hackworth spent the summer of 2005 as in intern at Curtiss-Wright EMD’s Advanced Product and Systems Division in Mount Pleasant, Pa. He was assigned to a team of engineers charged with developing a pulsed power supply for an electromagnetic system that will be used by the military. His assignments were twofold: Learn the rapid prototyping system dSpace and apply it to the design of a high-precision shaft position sensing subsystem within the pulsed power supply, and design the circuitry needed to decode the high-bandwidth signals that emanate from the shaft position sensor.
“Donald wasn’t just shadowing a more experienced engineer in his internship,” Ralph Ford, director of Behrend’s School of Engineering and Engineering Technology, said. “He had real responsibilities, and made a real contribution to Curtiss-Wright’s project, so much so that the company nominated him for these awards. For Behrend, it’s confirmation that the skills our students learn are in line with what employers require.”
Employers are looking carefully for certain skill sets, even outside of the formal interview process, as an experience Hackworth had last fall illustrates. A four-year tour guide for the Penn State Behrend admissions office, Hackworth was giving a tour to high school student Joe DeWitt when Joe’s mother, Michelle, the vice president of Repair, Replacement, and Automation Services at the Westinghouse Energy Center in Monroeville, handed him her card and asked him to send her his resume. After interviewing with the company over winter break, Hackworth was offered and accepted a position as an engineer in Westinghouse’s Reactor Protection Systems division.
“I told Mrs. Dewitt that I was signed up to do a prescreening interview with Westinghouse at the University Park Campus, but she assured me that she had already prescreened me, and I had passed,” Hackworth said of his impromptu interview experience. “When I went for my formal interview, it lasted four hours, and one of the men I met with was a father I had taken on a tour two years earlier.”
That student tour was a success not only for Donald Hackworth, but prospective student Joe Dewitt—he has accepted admission to Penn State Behrend and will begin his studies here in the fall.