Name: Amy Newman
Affiliation: Intensive German Summer Program 2010
Original Post: November 18, 2013
I am currently working at GKN Sinter Metals, a powder metal company with strong connections abroad, especially in Germany. I am in the Graduate Rotational Engineering Program (GREP). This means that for two years, I will spend six months each in four different locations, working on engineering projects. One of these will in the technical center in Germany. I just found out that my rotation in Germany will begin in February 2014. I will be working for three months in the technical center and three months in the plant in Radevormwald.
My current project involves bringing a quality system from Europe over to the Americas. This system was developed in German, and in September, an international team met in my plant in Gallipolis, Ohio to train on the new system. My knowledge of German, especially technical German, was invaluable during this week.
Although I am an engineer, I will definitely be using my German skills in the future.
Update: July 13, 2020
After working for GKN Sinter Metals for about 4 years, I went on to work at Ampco Pumps, a food and beverage pumps company headquartered in Milwaukee. I worked for them for two years. They have a small manufacturing/sales office about 45 minutes from Heidelberg, Germany and I was lucky enough to be able to go there for a short trip in November 2018. I didn’t have a lot of free time while in Heidelberg, but I definitely made time to revisit the castle and it brought back a lot of great memories of the Miami summer program.
My other stop on the trip was a trade show in Nuremberg. I was there to provide technical support in explaining our products to the potential customers. I was happy to learn that despite being a bit out of practice, within a day or so I was able to hold conversations about centrifugal, positive displacement pumps and mixing equipment in German. I definitely had to learn lots of new technical vocabulary for that! Fortunately my German colleagues were there to help me out.
Since November 2019, I have been working for Komatsu, a mining equipment company, as a mechanical engineer working on the electric mining shovels. Unfortunately, my current role does not require any use of German. I’ve been trying to read a novel in German to keep myself in practice. Hopefully in the future I will again have the opportunity to use German, either for work or fun.
