Under the guidance of my academic advisor and mechanical engineering professor, I helped conduct requirement analysis for a project with Lockheed Martin.
The task we had focused primarily on the systems engineering aspect of a design system where I helped with providing information of the connectedness of the system requirements. We created Design Structure Matrices based on part of speech and component analysis. From there, used the tools embedded in MATLAB to pull more information. (This project was export controlled). From this experience I learned the following industry skills:
- Requirement engineering and the connectedness of requirements.
- Different graphical analysis techniques such as betweenness, connectedness, degree for undirected graphs as well as other statistical techniques to analyze networks.
- Greatly expanded my MATLAB skills.
- The importance of and process for good research.
- How to receive criticism from other people.
- Completing tasks on time. The project involved weekly tasks/deadlines that needed to be finished so that the industry representative can discuss it with the team.
- Communication skills. I was fortunate enough to be on a conference call with head of the department and several key engineers trying to justify our findings. Also, weekly meetings and many emails came out of the experience.
Overall, we produced great information that helped fulfill the task goals.