Student Stories
Computer Science Co-Op Story: Nucor
Dominic Jeno Piccini
Computer Science
What company or organization did you co-op with and where are they located?
Nucor Steel | Decatur, AL
How did you identify and apply for your co-op? Are there any specific resources you used to find the opportunity (i.e. Handshake, career fairs, other recruitment events)?
Auburn Career Fair
What was the application process like?
I went and pitched myself to the company and after talking to them for a bit they asked if I wanted an interview the next day. I went to the interview looking nice and after a 45 minute interview I left feeling confident. I then got a phone call from Nucor about 2-3 weeks later saying that I got the job.
Tell us about your co-op experience. What types of tasks and projects did you engage in? Was there a particular project or part of the experience you learned the most from?
I was involved with a lot of Image Processing projects. This included: helping operators count shear percentage of a sample using a method of counting the pixels they hovered over with their mouse, creating an algorithm to check the height of the tail of a coiled steel to see if it was safe to cut the supports, creating a GPS system that could track where vehicles were on an image and display it in real time, creating an algorithm that will give operators knowledge of the dimensions of a Charpy sample. The project I learned the most from was a dummy project called Jimmy's Milkyway, it introduced me to image processing and basic techniques that I could use to apply to images.
In what ways did your co-op experience help you prepare for your next destination after Auburn?
It gave me real projects to work on and grew me as a person to work with all certain types of people.
In what ways did your coursework or other experiences at Auburn prepare you for your co-op work experience? Are there specific topics or skills you learned from classes that you put into practice on the job?
Everything to do with coding came in handy. Also time management of juggling multiple projects came in handy.
Do you have any advice for other students seeking a co-op experience?
Go create apps or anything else you find fascinating, your future employer will also find them interesting.
