As I woke up on the last day of my internship at NB Power, a feeling similar to the one I felt at the end of Shad Valley hit me once again. I realized that an amazing learning opportunity and truly rewarding experience was about to end. When I arrived at NB Power’s head office, I was greeted by the security personnel and wished a good day. I took the elevator to the fourth floor and proceeded to my cubicle where my supervisor was waiting to thank me for all my hard work. During my month long work term with NB Power, I was responsible for collecting data concerning various plants’ high pressure feed water heaters. I travelled around the province, taking readings and monitoring the heating systems. After gathering a sufficient amount of data, I conducted heat balances to determine whether the overall performance of the heaters had changed over the past few months.

My first task on my last day was finalizing all of the work I had completed; I reviewed my findings by making sure that my spreadsheets had the correct information and my summary reports accurately described the data’s relationship to both past statistics and the design specifications. When I finished going through my results, I converted the summaries to PDFs, scanned my calculations and sent them to my supervisor and other NB Power employees who would benefit from my work.

The time I spent at NB Power was genuinely unforgettable and it allowed me to learn more than I ever imagined about the engineering world. Shad Valley and this internship gave me the tools to recognize all of my strengths with which I was and will be able to succeed in all my endeavors. For this and many other things, I am very grateful.

Alex Pupek
Hometown: Fredericton, NB