My Summer Internship

As previously mentioned, a few *ahem* years ago after my junior year in college I spent the summer doing an internship at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington (near Seattle). To help you gain a little perspective on the places I’ll be talking about in this and subsequent blogs, here’s a map:

And zoomed in a bit more:

The pink dotted lines crossing the water are the ferries, so it takes 30-60 minutes to get to Seattle on the ferry.

But back to my point, I highly recommend doing a summer internship, especially in the engineering field. As opposed to internships in a lot of other disciplines, engineering internships pay really well! I was also able to complete my Senior design project with PSNS so I didn’t have to worry about it during the school year. For the first (and only) time in my life it was like I was getting paid to go to school!

So I spent the summer walking around and getting lost on aircraft carriers and submarines. Whenever one of the more senior engineers (they were all more senior than me) was going out to a boat to check on something I’d tag along.

The aircraft carriers are ginormous! They are so easy to get lost on, especially because most staircases are “up only” or “down only” so you can wander around a level looking for the right one to go up on, then there’s so many rooms and hallways on each level. And I stood on the flight deck and looked down at the water. You don’t realize how far up those things are! They’re very impressive ships.

The submarines were awesome, too! I was on some of the larger ones, the ones that carry big missiles. They’re actually quite roomy. We were talking with some of the crew members and they asked if we could remove all the old racks in their computer room and put a pool table in. The whole computer room is now unnecessary because everything can be run off a laptop but we couldn’t take the empty racks out because it would throw off the balance of the ship. And I don’t think it would be a good idea to throw off the balance of a submarine.

The above picture is of a submarine in dry dock (out of the water). The below picture is the same sub with the water coming in (or going out, I don’t know, really).

Here’s an old picture of a boat being built in dry dock:

Most of the buildings still look the same, there’s a lot of history to the place.
And just for kicks and giggles here’s a picture of a submarine in pieces:

Um, I feel like that was a really quick summary of things but I’m not sure what else you would want to know (if you’re not already bored to tears, that is)!

If you have any questions please leave them in the comments and I’d be happy to try to answer them!