Today the company visit to Eaton awaited us. Eaton is a company I already know a good bit about due to its close relationship with Pitt engineering. Eaton sponsors one of the labs in Benedum hall, so occasionally when I pass by it I can see the big logo in the fishbowl room. For me personally, I also have shown some interest in the past with Eaton. Being a computer engineer and as I mentioned with its close relationship with Pitt, Eaton is a company that interests me in terms of working. They have some internships that pertain to embedded systems / integrated circuits, which for now is what I think I want to do for work in the future.
The visit itself was very cool. We learned how the Eaton here in Korea is mainly focused on the automotive industry, working a lot with Hyundai and Kia. One thing I found interesting about their design process of some of the products they make for cars is how they use 3D printing to make prototypes to use for testing to continue fine tuning designs until ready for mass production in a higher resolution. In my engineering class last semester, I did similar things, using lower resolution materials to make what were called “pretotypes” due to them being at such a low stage of development they can’t be called prototypes, because that entails them having almost full functionality of what would be a final product. I asked them a question during their presentation of Eaton Korea about what other methods they may use to do some prototyping possibly before moving onto 3D printing, however due to the language barrier and some misunderstanding they answered a slightly different question, but nonetheless it was still very interesting to see how my engineering class so closely mirrored the process I may be doing when I get a job in engineering.
We then toured the facility, which was pretty much what was expected. A lot of robots, people in corners checking for problems with the products, lots of loud noises, forklifts, being told “don’t touch anything” a lot, etc. While it was very confusing to see some of the complicated machinery and whatever was on displays there, it was still cool to see what the actual facility floor looked like, as well as some other sort of features they have around the office that help improve production and overall quality of life.
After the Eaton visit, we went to a baseball game at the Gocheok Sky Dome Stadium, the Doosan Bears vs. the Kiwoom Heroes, two teams based in Seoul. Leading up to the game, I was excited because we would get to watch a sports match, but at the same time baseball is one of my least favorite sports to watch. However, I was extremely pleasantly surprised. The atmosphere at this baseball game was amazing, every time one team was at bat, everyone in the fan section for that team was standing up, dancing and singing along with the cheerleaders. We also ate some chicken which Dr. Yun told us we would like, and it definitely added a lot to the viewing experience. One of the players at the game even gave our group 3 balls throughout the duration of it.
At the end of the day, we were all quite exhausted. As I mentioned, baseball is one of my least favorite sports to watch with one of the main reasons being how long the games are. We got back to the hotel pretty late after a long, but very fun day. The baseball game will definitely be something I remember for a long time.