Today was a day of company visits, some I was quite excited for. First up was Hyundai, and this one I was rather intrigued by because I had always seen those commercials and videos inside of car factories where you can see the assembly line and it looks really cool to see the car being formed step by step. Unfortunately, I have almost no pictures of the Hyundai visit because they were strict with allowing basically no photos of anything there. It is kind of funny to me how I have pictures on my phone literally of North Korea but wasn’t allowed to take pictures of a car factory. Either way it was still cool to see all the different stages of the car being put together, and it was really interesting to learn how much is automated in the factory. I was always under the assumption that there would be a lot of robots in place to move things with perfect precision every time, but almost everything was done by robots. There were even robots that would bring raw materials around, we saw one driving by and it was even singing a song to let everyone know it was there.
After Hyundai was time for the visit to TK Elevators. This one was also rather intriguing to me for a different reason. I had no idea what to expect. Honestly, I was expecting a lot of just big elevators sitting around everywhere being mass produced, but I learned that there was a lot more to elevators than we think. The company started their introduction to us by showing us a video from Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, a scene where he talks about an elevator that essentially can go in every direction. That is when I learned that there did actually exist elevators than can go left and right as well as up and down. There were also twin elevators, which are two elevators in the same shaft, one on top of the other. I had no idea that elevators actually had anything new going on, I’ve been used to the same old elevators my whole life. The only thing I’d seen recently was when I got to Pitt where the elevators make you choose your floor before you get on, but honestly that’s nothing really crazy. For the most part elevators always feel like they’re not the best, but they’re the only option rather than taking the stairs, so I bet there is a lot to be done there. TK Elevators seemed to have some interesting stuff going on.
There were also some fall tests, which I didn’t really understand the purpose of but they seemed pretty fun. Basically, two of my classmates went on top of this foam pit with trap doors on top, and were dropped in. It was pretty funny at least. There was also one that demonstrated some sort of safety thing, where this kind of rope, I don’t remember the names, but it was allowed to freely move up and down, but as soon as something drops, kind of like how a seatbelt works, it instantly stops.
This had been my first time inside these types of big company factories, so it was interesting to see a lot of things. The key takeaway for sure was how automated everything was. Practically everything is done by robots in the factories, with some humans basically just doing checking for imperfections, which are rare to begin with, and making sure the robots are working fine.
For dinner, me and my group went nearby the hotel to a place with only 4 things on the menu, but well known in the area for having really good food. And it definitely lived up to the hype. Definitely one of my favorite meals so far of some dumplings and noodle soup, a pleasant change from the amount of fish I have seen among some other questionable things.