What am I doing here?

Well I am definitely keeping busy here at Clipper.  They have a lot of projects for me to work on so its never a dull moment.  I'll admit its nice to get a break from lesson planning and grading and get to work on other skills. 
I'm not really used to cubicle life :

If I were here long term I'd definetly need to decorate and add a personal touch, but since I'm only here for 6 weeks I'll just deal with the pictureless walls.  I'm surrounded by great people that have excellent senses of humor, so its adds a little fun to the day.

The project I'm currently working on is holding up the blade they keep out front:

But lucky for my arms I found a solution for that:

The first two weeks I've been mostly working on a project to help them automate their reporting system.  Currently they are pulling their data from a raw data program and then creating reports in Excel to show relationships betwen various items.  For my deptartment these reports are focusing on turbine availability and downtime.  So I've been creating links between their Excel data and graphs with Power Point, which is what they present to executives, to help streamline the process of formatting.  Its been a positive experience so far and I look forward to getting into more projects that I'll be able to take back into my math classroom and share with the students.

Week 1 Guided Question

What concerns did I have at the beginning of the externship?  What did I do or what help did I have to overcome those concerns?

Well I was warned that the first week would be overwhelming and that's pretty much how I felt.  The first few days I experienced that "in-over-my-head" feeling thus creating a fear that I wouldn't be capable of accomplishing the projects given to me.  This was also due to the fact that I wasn't too familiar with the wind power industry to begin with.

To help alleviate some of those fears, for the first few days I just allowed myself to learn as much as I could about the overall wind power industry and not even worry about the details of my projects.  I did some extra courses on Clipper University, a training module, that gave me a great overview of the company and the industry in general.  I asked LOTS of questions, probably really dumb ones like "what's the difference between AC and DC power?"  or "what's the difference between a converter and an inverter?".  Everyone here at Clipper has been very welcoming, helpful and willing to answer my questions. 

This help from eveyone has really allowed me to enjoy the first week here.  Towards the end of the week I began a few of my projects and was even able to finish one already! I am much more confident now that I will not only learn a great deal from this experience in which I will take back to my classroom, but that I will be able to contribute to Clipper as well.

Day 4 at Clipper Wind

This week is going incredibly fast!  I spent a day in RMDC (Remote Monitoring & Diagnostic Center) learning about their monitoring system and how they report faults.  I'm simplifying of course, but it's a control room with lots of monitors to keep track of every little detail of all of their turbines across the country and Mexico.  They also monitor the weather, which this time of year means looking out for lightening and warning the field technicians.  There were a lot of phones ringing and alarm bells going off...a very intense job.  The monitoring of faults and lost turbine hours directly relates to one of the projects I'll be working on here so it was very beneficial to get firsthand experience in the RMDC.

The past few days I've been working a lot in Excel creating spreadsheets and graphs for data regarding availability percentages for various fleets.  It was fun in a nerdy kind of way getting to just work with raw data!  I guess it doesn't take much to entertain me.  I am finding this industry very interesting and believe it's only going to grow as we hopefully begin to reduce our dependency on non-renewable sources of energy and continue advancing in the use of renewable sources.

Day One at Clipper Wind

Its been an action packed and very productive first day here at Clipper Wind.  First I was given a tour of the plant, located in Cedar Rapids, where they manufacture and produce the wind turbines.  (The towers and the blades are made elsewhere) When looking at the wind turbines in a field from a distance they look big, however I didn't realize how large they truly are until I was up close and personal with one today.  They are massive!  I even got to climb inside the hub and gearbox and check out the mechanics of these amazing things.
Along with the standard safety tours and training any new employee would experience, I was fortunate to get the opportunity to dive right into the good stuff and learn a little about their fault data analysis, which is the area I'll be working on.  I got a glimpse of one of the programs they use, I believe called LabView, where they take various inputs from the turbines and anaylze the data.  It's my first day and I've already seen various math concepts in use such as matrices, best fitting lines, sine and cosine functions, and lots of statistical analysis.  I actually have a concrete example for when my Algebra 2 students ask me why we need to learn Inverse Matrices.  I saw it in action today, and to think this is only the first!
I am pleasantly surprised how much I've learned in just one day.  I'm also surprised that there is actually an industry that seems to use even more acronyms than in the educational field.  Who knew?!

Pre-Externship Meeting

Today I'm attending the preview meeting and learning how to start a blog.  Exciting stuff!