Career Skills Training:
Besides visiting a wide variety of manufacturing plants, students employees gain experience in many areas vital to developing skills for engineering careers.  They operate as energy consultants, with plant managers as clients, so professional interpersonal skills are nurtured.  Employees learn to gather information from various sources key to manufacturing across a wide range of industries, including ASHRAE handbooks, equipment suppliers, Best Practices training course materials, industry experts, valid web sites, and standard software tools. All employees gain experience in report writing, review, and information integration.  Above all, the operation of the IAC is a team effort, providing peer group interactions which build confidence in the workplace while working toward common goals.  Each year one experienced individual is chosen as Lead Student to represent the CSU center at a national meeting in Washington, D.C.  The breadth of such experience develops networking and contacts which return benefits as students move into their future careers.  In many cases, IAC students become valuable contributors to various branches of the energy industry, or related areas of waste reduction or improved plant productivity.

DOE Project:
The IAC is a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that has been housed in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at CSU since 1984 and provides free industrial assessments to qualified small and medium-size manufacturers in Colorado and the greater Rocky Mountain region. Each assessment recommends specific measures that the manufacturer can take that will save money through energy efficiency, pollution prevention, and productivity improvement.

Assessment Activities:
Mike Kostrzewa, as Assistant Director, leads a team of 4-6 undergraduate and graduate students on a one-day plant visit on Thursdays during the semester. During the plant visit, the team gets a tour of the manufacturing operations with an emphasis on the operations that use energy and generate waste. The team then gathers to discuss their observations, brainstorm for specific recommendations, and spend the rest of the day gathering data to support our assessment recommendations (ARs). After returning to CSU, the undergraduate students are assigned the tasks of researching each idea and preparing an analysis that includes the energy and waste savings or productivity increase, the cost savings, and the estimated cost to implement the recommendation. Completed ARs are reviewed by other students to check for clarity, accuracy, and proper detail. Typically one student from the team is assigned as author to assemble ARs into a final report. This entails a general description of the plant and processes, sample cost calculations, and verification of agreement between all sections. The final report is reviewed and modified as needed by the Director and Assistant Director before submission to our Field Managers at Rutgers University within the 60 day period following the site visit.  After six months, a student will contact the plant to verify which ideas have been implemented.

Expected Workload:
The IAC contract calls for 12 assessments per year, so an average of one assessment is conducted each month. The IAC is staffed to provide a teams of students that conduct assessments on Thursdays so that each student will go along on an average of one assessment per month. In terms of time commitment, this translates to about 10 hours for the plant visit and about 5-10 hours per week during the semester in preparing the analyses for the report. The starting salary for entry-level interns at the IAC is about $10.00/h.

Who Should Apply:
Undergraduates from the Department of Mechanical Engineering are preferred, although students from any Engineering discipline are invited to apply. As a reference, here are some types of students and traits that would work well for students in the IAC program: