Internship Highlight: Ellen Angwin

Driven by her interest in green steel production and steel recycling, rising senior Ellen Angwin spent the summer working as a Metallurgy Intern at Nucor Steel in Crawfordsville, Indiana. 

Throughout the summer, she worked on a project related to the property variation of steel sheets caused by different annealing cycles. The cycles are controlled heating and cooling processes that are used to change steel’s internal structure in order to make it more ductile and easier to work with. 

Angwin also worked on a process engineering project focused on how a mill can change some of its operations in order to reduce the amount of scrap it creates. She credits her lab experiences and materials science and engineering courses with preparing her to use equipment in the facilities at Nucor.

“The core MSE classes prepared me to be able to discuss the metallurgy behind the steel making processes, which allowed me to better understand the work that is done at Nucor,” she said. “I learned a lot about how the processing of a material can be used to tune its properties.”

The core MSE classes prepared me to be able to discuss the metallurgy behind the steel making processes

Ellen Angwin, Senior Undergraduate Student, CMU Materials Science and Engineering

One of the highlights of her time at Nucor was working on projects inside the steel mill, where she was able to interact with and learn from employees with a variety of roles at the company.  

As Angwin returns to campus to resume her studies, she is prepared to apply the skills that she has refined in the classroom and beyond. 

“Learning how to communicate my ideas with other people in the industry will prepare me for networking and sharing my research in the future,” she said.