Today’s visits to Titan Cement and Athens Airport was filled with lots of insightful knowledge and interesting events. Titan Cement had a unique vertical integration system on site; their production process began with harvesting from a limestone quarry on the property and ended with storage in vast silos near the same quarries. Titan also showed us around their R&D department, who thoroughly reviewed their product development process and how they test potential product. Although most of our guides were chemical engineers, I thought that it was interesting to see and learn how various engineers of differing disciplines work together to create one final product.

At Athens Airport, we first toured their photovoltaic park, where they generate over 100MW of energy daily (For context, the average Greek household uses 4MW of energy annually). Alongside learning about the photovoltaic park, it was really interesting to learn about airport systems and how they operate. Specifically, I thought it was especially impressive how the airport must work with the state, the police, international powers, and individual passengers successfully to operate the airport. Hence, being able to see these processes live and understand the underlying work necessary for their function was really amazing.

Moving forward, I think that our visits today to Titan and Athens Airport will be really helpful as I grow as an engineer. Touring both companies was really insightful and helped me better understand how to work with others and across specialties to create one final successful product, whether it be a real physical product or social one.