Tony Argote, a current sophomore and Mechanical Engineering major from Miami, Florida, participates in the Coop Program at Gerogia Tech. This summer he worked for General Motors in Michigan. Tony shares some of his experiences as a freshman Coop student.
This past summer I had the pleasure of working at General Motors Global Energy Center as a Coop, and it was one of the most exciting and stimulating experiences I've had during my time here at Tech. During my work rotation I was able to work with some of the automotive industries best engineers on one of the biggest automotive issues to date, fuel economy. The projects I worked on were very challenging. I had to create a brand new, user-friendly corporate Energy Template (used in simulating fuel economy), as well as making modifications to a simulation program known as the Unified Model. These projects pulled some of the skills I learned here at Georgia Tech from courses like CS 1371 (Computing for Engineers) and ME 1770 (Introduction to Engineering Graphics and Visualization). In the end, the projects that I worked on where fun and meaningful, and the time I spent working and learning about General Motors was invaluable.
Details on the Energy Template project
The Energy Template is a complex Excel spreadsheet that uses the "Visual Basic" programming language to compute Fuel Economy in a matter of seconds. The original template used to be a 5-megabyte file before I worked on it and it could only do the calculus based numerical integration for one car. The end result of my project was a one megabyte file that could simultaneously integrate values for up to 255 cars, using over 100,000 time sensitive data points.
Details on the Unified Model project
What the Unified Model does in detail is confidential, but what I worked on I can discuss. I created a program that would run along with the Unified Model to check and make sure that the user input is valid, thus preventing undetectable (yet dangerous) simulation error. I had to use a good deal of MATLAB skills in this project, all of which I learned here at Tech (CS 1371). I had to present both of these projects to several key executives. For my presentations, I used a good deal of stuff I learned in ME 1770.