A summer to remember

Chemical Engineering ChemE students at Carnegie Mellon University took their skills across the country this summer, with responsibilities ranging from pharmaceutical operations to user experience development. Internships broadened their understanding of the chemical engineering field and delivered hands-ons learning opportunities to set them up for success in their careers. Here, the students reflect on their experiences and share their top takeaways. 

Kate Bergan ‘27

It’s my job to help day-to-day operations run a little bit more smoothly on Merck’s vaccine bulk operations team for VAQTA, the hepatitis A vaccine. My team is moving towards a goal that concerns the patients we are working to protect as well as money, so it’s been quite different from my academics. Everything is a lot more serious. Since I’ve had to navigate a lot of learning curves, though, I’ll be able to tackle my classes with a broader understanding of how things work.

I’ve been working on a lot of continuous improvement projects updating different software systems that we use, creating user guides and material tracking dashboards, and attending meetings to understand the status of where our different batches of the different vaccines are. I’ve encountered processes and equipment that I’ve learned about in class but never actually seen, so being able to lay my eyes on it has really helped me understand how these things work in the industry and the sheer scale of them. It’s given me a better understanding of the exact things that chemical engineers actually do, and visualize some of the processes that occur. It’s been really cool to see how all of the different roles and sections of the pharmaceutical industry work together, and I’ve gotten the chance to connect with so many people.

Matt Murphy ‘28 

I’m working at Akselos—which is an MIT spinoff with offices in the US, Europe, the Middle East and Asia—where we create a structural performance management platform for oil refineries and other energy industry plants. We monitor the reactors, the heat exchangers, and everything else that goes on in the plant, we give projected life to it. What I’m doing as an engineering simulations intern is creating the thermal models that feed into the SPM.

I started out by doing temperature profiles for heat exchangers, and now I’m working on furnace temperature profiles. My job is to kind of fill in the blanks in the furnace’s sensors based on first principles with heat transfer and thermodynamics. A lot of the work I’ve done involves things that have already been in the ChemE curriculum, so a lot of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics. My work at Akselos has actually given me a head start on heat transfer because that’s the core of what I do. As an upcoming junior that hasn’t yet taken heat transfer, I had to learn a lot on my own.

I’m learning from people who have been in the industry for more than 20 years. Communicating with other engineers and learning how to break down the work from your own understanding into a bite-sized thing that other engineers can understand is super important. The collaborative experience is definitely helping me become a better engineer.

Kabir Singh ‘27

This summer, I returned to Procter & Gamble as an R&D intern, where I worked on a computational project focused on building AI-based consumer models for our brand. A large part of my work involved developing and iterating on these models to better replicate how real consumers think and respond.

One thing that has helped tremendously is the computational background I’ve developed through Chemical Engineering at CMU. A significant portion of the ChemE curriculum involves coding and computational modeling, particularly in areas like Reactions Engineering, Optimization Modeling, and more. For my internship, I also needed to learn UI design in Python, and that transition felt very natural because of Python problem solving exposure from the ChemE coursework.

At the same time, this project really reinforced that the technical side is only a part of the overall challenge. To build a useful consumer model, I had to first understand the people that I was trying to model. Like, learning what they care about, how they make decisions, and, most importantly, the ‘why’ behind it all. This internship taught me that regardless of the company or industry, the qualitative is equally, if not more, important to the quantitative, and that begins by understanding who you are trying to serve.

This internship was a testament to the breadth and versatility of the ChemE field. Ultimately, you learn some of what you need to know in the classroom, and then you pick up the rest of it on the job.

Sofya Vinokurova ‘27

As an engineering intern at Levare this summer, I supported engineering and manufacturing-related projects connected to product development. Levare specializes in electric submersible pumps and horizontal pumping systems, which are typically used in the oil, gas, and water industries. I worked on internal engineering guidelines related to material compatibility and demanding operating conditions.

It’s a great experience for me because I applied  a lot of the thermodynamics and fluid mechanics of chemical properties, and everything that we’ve talked about in those classes. Even just the way that I conducted some of the preliminary research uses a lot of what I learned in my classes. A lot of the classes in the ChemE program also teach us to account for real-world factors. I think one of the big things that I learned is how to do a lot of independent preliminary research and take real responsibility for the fact that I’m writing a certain document—I learned to take ownership of my work, support my decisions with research, and be prepared to review and adjust them when needed.

Ruoyun Xu ‘28

At CMU, I was taking courses and then doing the research. Here, at Caltech, I’m a full-time researcher in Professor Julia Kornfield’s lab, getting insight into how chemical engineering can be applied with an environmental sustainability focus. I’m getting two sets of skills. One is technical—I’m learning how to analyze the materials, specifically biopolymers. The other set is soft skills, such as collaboration, presenting my work, planning my experiment, and talking to mentors. I am learning about how a mature researcher will think and consider the question. Learning how to become an independent researcher is moving me towards my goal of entering a graduate program in chemical engineering, just how ChemE is giving me the flexibility to explore my interests.

The ChemE curriculum really supported me in getting this internship, and vice versa. A combination of rigorous coursework and research classes has prepared me for this experience, which is in turn teaching me more about the framework of chemical engineering and its applications. Now, I can see how the ChemE core courses I will take in the future can all be applied to my interest in environmental sustainability.

At the start of the summer, these students took their classroom experiences with them to their internships. Now as the fall semester picks up its pace, they are bringing their real-world experiences back to the classroom. This combination will prepare them to be tomorrow’s engineers, problem solvers, and industry leaders.  

Interested in exploring internships options? Don't miss CMU's STEM Career Fair on September 15-17, 2026. 

For media inquiries, please contact Lisa Kulick, lkulick@andrew.cmu.edu