This co-op rotation was the first of three with The Dow Chemical Company which is the largest chemical manufacturing company in the United States. Dow is the largest producer of polyethylene in the world, and this 
summer I had the opportunity to work in Base Plastics Technical Services and Development, TS&D. The group I was in focused on polyethylene food and specialty packaging and operated as the technical interface between manufacturing and the customer. Plastics TS&D is solely located at the Freeport site in Texas which allowed me to not only work along side project engineers but technicians and global leaders as well. Plastics TS&D is meant to provide technical support and continual improvement for plastic’s customers, which is composed of converting and packaging companies. On one side, TS&D looks to listen to customer’s needs and alter different resins in order to meet a customer’s specific demands. However, the engineers do participate in various research projects as well, creating patents and trying to formulate new polymer properties. Overall, it is a market driven business group, and I was extremely fascinated by the customer interaction that the engineers had, since I am hoping to land a business role in my future career.
I really enjoyed TS&D because there was something new to do every day. Most employees have several accounts or projects that they are responsible for, thus, different tasks are being completed for separate projects every day. I was assigned four projects, and I would try to complete a small part of each every day. My main assignment was to research different additives that could be put into polyethylene in order to change the properties of the film. Because I had to bring in new chemicals and do the testing myself, I had to complete a process Dow uses to review and determine if any new chemicals or procedures being adopted by the operation are safe. Furthermore, I had to gain training on various machines to satisfy the safety requirements needed to operate any machinery Dow owns. Once this was completed I had to have the resins mixed with the new chemicals and converted into film. Although I was not able to actually make the film myself, I was able to shadow the technician, while he generated the film rolls I needed. Over a two week span, I had to test each film roll on a specific machine, in order to generate the data needed to analyze what additive proved to be the most beneficial. On another project, I had to mine through over 1500 different test samples entered into the laboratory management system. Over the term, I looked at data generated by Dow over a long history from all the major tests used to analyze film resin. I entered this data into JMP, which is a statistics program, and generated a database that gives comparisons of different resins. Through this assignment, I learned a lot about the physics behind film testing while also gaining some experience with JMP, which is statistical software being widely used by many companies for experimental analysis and Six Sigma projects. These projects were just a few that I worked on over my 12 week period. Every day challenged my project planning and management skills as new tasks were added and problems arose in each project. This co-op taught me to always brainstorm and anticipate any obstacle, because a problem, big or small, could have caused me to miss any one of my deadlines.
I really enjoyed everything about this co-op. I was able to go to Texas and vacation around some of the big cities of the south like, New Orleans, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. I was able to tour large scale plants making thousands of pounds of anything from plastics to various epoxies. I was able to make new friends with the other co-ops who I still stay in touch with, and learn what life is like in other parts of the United States. This was an unforgettable experience, and I am really looking forward to my next term with the company.
-Robert Guerrieri
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