Student Stories
Aerospace Engineering Internship Story: DBD International
Luke Brames
Aerospace Engineering
What company did you intern with and where are they located?
DBD International in Aiken SC, primary office in Manchester, United Kingdom.
How did you identify and apply for your internship? Are there any specific resources you used to find the opportunity (i.e., Handshake, career fairs, other recruitment events)?
I submitted my resume to the company through the “resume drop” feature on the career fair plus app before a career fair and they reached out for an interview.
What was the application process like?
I went through the first round interview with a recruiter the day after the career fair, then completed a second round interview virtually with the recruiter, a project manager, and a U.K. intern.
Tell us about your internship 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 did many different assignments and tasks in my time at DBD. I primarily worked on a software program to automate generating complex nuclear material transfer procedures at the Savannah River Site nuclear facility. I implemented many features and fixes into this program. The largest accomplishment was a continuous improvement pipeline I developed which runs a series of tests, debuggers, and security scans on new code going into the problem and automatically identifies and suggests fixes for errors and vulnerabilities. This pipeline I designed will run almost daily for every engineer working on the project for at least the next 5-10 years, and should speed up code implementation by more than 30%. I learned a ton of new skills and processes, both in hard skills like coding and automation as well as soft skills such as interacting with clients and process optimization.
In what ways did this internship help you prepare for your next destination after Auburn?
This experience gave me a myriad of new skills that can be applied both academically and in the professional world. I will go into my next endeavor with an expanded engineering skill set as well as a more developed understanding of how to work within teams, navigate client and inter-company relationships and communication, and the ways I work most efficiently.
In what ways did your coursework or other experiences at Auburn prepare you for your internships? Are there specific topics or skills you learned from classes that you put into practice on the job?
Auburn helped me gain many of the hard skills I used at the job, but truthfully many of the actual formulas and hard information I learned was negligibly applicable. The most valuable skills I took from Auburn into my experience was the method of thinking about problems and process of solving that have been ingrained in me from my classes. The mental structure of how you approach, relegate, and structure a solution to a problem that I have learned at Auburn was essential to my success.