by Samuel Rodriguez

Our very own St. John Bosco Braves had the privilege of interning at Pelican Engineering throughout the summer. Pelican Engineering is a company that specializes in military-grade cases to safely store weapons, ammunition, and other valuable gear.

The students that participated were from Bosco’s engineering pathway and were sent to discover what it takes to be an engineer in the real world. Senior Ethan Persi gave us an insight on the type of work that went into play while at Pelican.

“When we would work, we had to construct a prototype and come up with the final solution for the project that they had given us. With [their prototype], we had to make a design for it so that they could pick up where we left off because the stuff we made is actually going to be implemented into their line,” Persi said.

The students worked 21 hours a week and had to implement what they learned within the engineering pathway to compete and communicate with other departments and teams to further their research for their product. Senior Brandon Rios spoke about the factors that came into play when developing his solution with his team as well.

“We had to communicate with everybody else in each department from Pelican to make sure our product was viable for manufacturing and it was economically sound and a whole host of other things. It really hard to do with the business side of engineering and the working side of engineering also,” said Rios.

Our Braves had a very memorable experience when interning at Pelican. This put them ahead of other schools by coming face-to-face with real life engineering challenges and figuring out ways to overcome the challenges ahead of them.

“We learned a lot, it was incredibly informative. Hopefully Bosco is thinking about continuing that relationship with Pelican for years so that keeps going,” said Rios.

“It was a great experience and if you have the opportunity to take the internship you definitely should,” Persi added.

This was the first year that St. John Bosco engineering students took part in the Pelican Engineering internship. The students plan to incorporate the skills that they learned at Pelican into their engineering and robotics programs here at Bosco.