ATC college interns shine during remote work experience
It may not be the experience they envisioned, but American Transmission Co. interns are making the most of their virtual internships as they pursue their academic and career goals.
Fifteen college students participated in this year’s virtual internship program, hailing from some of the region’s best universities, including UW-Madison, Purdue University, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Platteville and Marquette University Law School.
The interns worked part-time and as in previous years, participated in volunteer activities including the virtual United Way of Greater Milwaukee and Waukesha County’s Intern Day of Action. This year’s internship program included many virtual activities tailored to optimize the interns’ remote working experiences and help them stay connected and engaged. The onboarding program included a work-from-home ergonomics session and virtual substation and system operations center tours. ATC leaders, mentors and others worked to ensure the interns experienced the best that ATC has to offer while working remotely.
Brandon Dobrowski attends UW-Platteville where he’s pursuing a degree in electrical engineering with an emphasis in power and controls. He had great things to say about ATC’s company culture.
“My first impression of ATC was how well this company was run and how amazing the people are that work for ATC,” he said. “Every person I have met with and spoken to are some of the nicest and most welcoming people I have ever engaged with. If I have a question on something, there are multiple people that are more than willing to help me and guide me down the right path.”
Dobrowski worked with the T-Line services department on lightning correlation research. “I have been going through the outages of 2019 and writing lightning summaries for each outage that is correlated to lightning. I am now going through all the data and will be searching for commonalities and other interesting correlations. Hopefully, I will be part of writing a research paper on the interesting findings involved with lightning correlations.”
Kallie Maas attends the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities and is pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering with a minor in Spanish. She interned in the ratings department at ATC.
“I work both independently and in small groups with the ratings team on different tasks and initiatives to benefit both the company and my professional development,” Maas said. “One project has been filing road construction documents into a company database called ETRAILS to organize the projects taking place near the transmission lines. My main project has been the change point detection initiative, where I identify new objects near the transmission lines and rights of way using GIS software.”
Maas’ experiences at ATC incorporated the company’s values of We Care, We Challenge, We Commit, We Communicate, We Compete and We Celebrate.
“My work here at ATC really incorporated the ATC values because it challenges our company and shows how we care about our customers,” she said. “The change point detection initiative is a cost-effective way to monitor our lines, so we can identify clearance concerns in the right of way and correct them. This allows us to operate the grid in the safest manner for our customers and those who live near the right of way.”
