Biomedical Engineering at its finest

 Last fall I accepted a co-op position with DePuy Synthes, in Warsaw, Indiana. For those of you that don't know, a co-op is an internship during the semester where you go and work for more than one semester. So for example, I worked there for the spring semester, then I have the summer off, then I go back and will work there for my fall semester, then I come back for school next spring semester, and finally I work there again next summer. Altogether, I will complete 3 rotations (3 semesters = 1 year) of work with a better chance of getting hired after I graduate. While my graduation is now delayed till Spring of 2016, the more rotations the better and I am not in a hurry to start working for the rest of my life.

So rant/background information aside, I worked there this last spring in the Hips Research and Development group. DePuy is a Johnson & Johnson company so the atmosphere was incredible. There was a gym in the building with personal training and everything, a cafeteria, and a group of people that were the most relaxed adults I have ever seen while working. Overall it was good. At first I was very bored, however as I started to express how bored I was to the other engineers, the more random projects I was given.

Random was a good thing, in which I was able to work on many different things. I did some motion simulation where you take all of the 3D models of each of the hip components on the computer, put them together, and move them in order to determine the range of motion for each combination. As engineering-like and wordy as that sounds, it is actually super cool and I am one of very few people that actually know how to do it on NX (hence why I was hired). I also did some sterilization testing which is the opposite; sounds really cool but isn't really. All you do is take parts and put them in an Autoclave (steam and pressure sterilizer - hospitals use), take them out after 45 minutes, let them cool (parts@140 ish degrees C), check them for rust, and then throw them back in for another cycle. Lame, I've literally done it 500 times, and by literally I mean actually; again lame.

After feeling like my brain had melted slightly from Autoclaving my life away, one day that I met this engineer named Frank. He is one of the greatest engineers to work with. Now he gives you a lot of crap (in a joking/good way ---sometimes), but because of him I got to work on some pretty interesting projects. We were trying to mold the acetabulum and the femur of cadavers accurately (haha - sarcasm because of the difficulty of the task). Therefore, I completed my first cadavar lab. Granted it was a little weird at first, but I found the intricacies of the body amazing. It is crazy to think that once it gets damaged it can never be the same; no matter how great the engineering.