Throughout the summer of 2006, I worked for the Gas Company at the Energy Resouce Center in Downey, CA. I tested commercial cooking applicances for gas energy efficiency. It was a really amazing job.

I love eating and that's what I spent a good amount of time doing. To test convection ovens we would bake dozens and dozens of potatoes at a time. Sometimes a few hundred in a day. For combination ovens we cooked chickens. Pizzas were used for conveyor oven testing. Unfortunately, school began before I had the chance to try any pizzas. The test standard called for cooking upwards of a hundred pizzas per oven tested. After that I heard that my group was going to test boilers by reheating massive amounts of clam chowder. I missed out on some good food. In any case, the food products were all weighed before and after testing and were probed with thermocouples during cooking. The ovens were wired up to determine gas and electricity usage, internal temperature, water usage and the like. After cooking the food, it was given away to employees and nearby shelters. Some days I would eat a dozen or so potatoes and one day managed to eat 18 pieces of chicken covered in hot sauce. On top of this, professional chefs would often come in to try out ovens or to show them off to potential buyers. They produced amazing food which I frequently sampled. Some of the more memorable dishes were creme brulee, poached salmon, a huge tri tip roast, baked panko-coated chicken, and an experimental recipe for fruit pancakes.

When I wasn't eating, I was analyzing data from the cooking tests or organizing the results into reports. Reading massive spreadsheets and writing fifty page reports made me learn to love coffee all over again. There were also a surprising number of meetings to attend.

Learning to be comfortable with 50 x 10,000 excel spreadsheets has given me a huge advantage over my classmates when doing computer data analysis. I also gained some very valuable report writing knowledge and experience. I learned about the hierarchies in big companies like the Gas Company and how hard it is to get little things done sometimes. I was priveleged to join my group in some fairly high level meetings which gave me insight into big company politics. My internship experience was a wonderful one. I learned a lot, ate a lot, experienced a lot, built up a good network at a big company and had a lot of fun.