Ellie Parkes ’26 puts her electrical engineering skills to work at Dow’s operations plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Ellie Parkes ’26 got a charge out of her internship with Dow, one of the world’s leading materials science companies. Parkes, an electrical engineering major in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, worked on projects to improve energy production at the company’s operations plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “Electrical engineering is such a broad field, and this exposure to one of the career paths I could take has really helped me understand what my future looks like,” she says.
Admittedly, Parkes wasn’t familiar with Dow when a representative contacted her through Handshake about a hiring expo for electrical engineers, but she followed up. In interviews, she fielded both situational and technical questions, and when an offer came her way, she accepted and spent 12 weeks in Louisiana.
The company’s industrial complex generates, distributes and uses its own power, and was replacing old equipment, dating back as far as the ’50s, as part of a new multimillion-dollar grid, she says. “My major projects were looking for improvement opportunities at our lower voltage levels (mostly 2400V), such as making existing electrical setups more reliable.” Parkes was also involved with work on the new transformers. “There was definitely a lot of coordination that had to take place given how many things were going on at one time,” she says.
Parkes stands in front of a transformer that was being renovated. It connects a gas turbine to a network of cables that eventually take power to the plant’s grid.
These experiences helped Parkes recognize the importance of communicating across disciplines. “Most of the people I worked with on a day-to-day basis were chemical and mechanical engineers who didn’t know much about electrical systems,” she says. “Being able to communicate high-level electrical concepts through images and metaphors has been a skill that helped me a lot through my time here.”
The most enjoyable part of the internship, Parkes says, was the variety of people she met and learned from. She forged friendships and says working with such a diverse group of people enhanced her teamwork and communication skills. Not only that, but she most likely never envisioned having a teammate who wrangled alligators on the weekends. “He offered to take my roommate and me with him when he went this summer,” she says, “but we both had to politely decline.”
Next summer, Parkes hopes to explore another electrical engineering field that interests her. “Many of the soft and technical skills I learned through working with a team will help me not only to get a job in the future,” she says, “but to also be successful in my field.”
