During the summer of 2023, I completed a 12 week internship at Rivian Automotive as a Process Engineer for the Drive Unit team in Normal, Illinois.  Rivian is an electric vehicle company on a mission to Keep the World Adventurous Forever. The company makes Electric Adventure Vehicles, such as the R1T and R1S, as well as making 100,000 electric delivery vans for Amazon.

During my time at Rivian I worked at their main manufacturing plant, sitting adjacent to the machinery creating each of the drive units that would go into each Rivian vehicle. I worked on several different projects, spanning from increasing the efficiency of certain manufacturing processes, sorting through MES data to identify under preforming stations, increasing the detail of the floor layout, etc.

Due to confidentiality reasons, I am limited in what I can disclose here, but my main project was to implement a testing station to re-introduce a component removed from failed inverters back into the drive unit manufacturing line. This project required me to not only design the system itself, but also present my plan to managers, operation leads, safety engineers, and other relevant teams to ensure I was meeting all the necessary requirements. Some details about the final station are that it involved a high voltage testing apparatus that I designed a custom safety interlock system for, had several pages of documentation about the standard operating procedures and circuit diagrams, and is projected to recoup over $200,000 per quarter simply from recycling a component which would have previously become scrap.