"I was glad to have a chance to work in industry between my junior and senior years. My job at ABC Corporation was to create an Excel spreadsheet of all the product drawing numbers that had been created as paper blueprints, before CAD drawings were used. Some of these products are still manufactured, but design changes were hard to track because no one thought to search the paper files. I spent a lot of time copying lists of print numbers from crinkly old sepia paper into columns in my computer spreadsheet. Although that job was not what I would want to do for my whole career, I learned a lot about the history of ABC by doing that job, and it was a real eye-opener to see how easy it is to waste resources duplicating effort and re-learning lessons just because information that was already documented wasn't easily available. It made me realize how important it is to track down the history of a project before initiating a bunch of work that may have already been done in the past. The importance of good documentation is a lesson that will always stick with me."
