Marine Travelift hires UW-Green Bay’s first engineering co-op student | Door County Pulse
Marine Travelift recently partnered with the Resch School of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay to bring the first engineering co-op student to the company for a seven-month, hands-on experience.
The company on Yew Street in Sturgeon Bay has found success in the past with summer internships in departments including accounting, marketing, engineering and purchasing, and within the warehouse and on the assembly floor.
“The biggest difference between an internship and a co-op is their duration,” said Michelle Waldinger, director of human resources for Marine Travelift/ExacTech. “Students who participate in a co-op typically alternate semesters of academic study with longer periods of paid, full-time work. Internships, on the other hand, are typically short in duration.”
Will Stuart of Peshtigo is the mechanical-engineering major who was hired for the co-op opportunity, which runs June-December of this year. He will be working full time with the designers and engineers on multiple projects, including a custom spreader beam design for an industrial customer in Tennessee.
Stuart said he has been able to apply several concepts from his classroom study at UW-Green Bay to the design process at Marine Travelift. These include static equilibrium equations, beam-loading fundamentals and shear/moment diagrams. In addition, SolidWorks software – which Stuart learned to use in a UW-Green Bay class – is a huge part of the design process at Marine Travelift.
“You don’t really know what an engineer does and how coursework is applied to real problems until you work in the industry,” said Prof. Patricia Terry, with UW-Green Bay’s Resch School of Engineering. “So, a co-op experience will enhance students’ understanding of the engineering field and make their classroom learning more meaningful.”
