WKU News

Landon Owens, a senior electrical engineering major from Bowling Green, is interning at HeathCo this summer. His main focus is on product testing for the company.

 “When we’re manufacturing a new product, we go through several early iterations and refine the product to meet our standards as well as our contractor’s standard,” Owens said. “This can be anything from making sure the color is uniform across an entire 20 sample batch to making sure that the product won't trip someone's breaker if it gets wet.”

HeathCo is the manufacturer and marketer of Heath®Zenith branded products. With innovative technologies and products, the company is an industry leader in the intelligent lighting and door chime markets.

Attaining applied learning experiences in the electrical engineering field is something that Owens found to be crucial to his college career. 

“I wanted experience in the industry to see what the design process was like for home electronics style products. Additionally, it didn't seem right to just read about circuits, physics, math, and whatever else without looking at how these things get applied in the real world,” Owens said. 

Owens said that the best part of the internship so far is being able to take a more integrated position in some of the projects. 

“Sometimes my role isn't just to test a product, but to find a unique issue we never considered before and communicate with the engineering team, the people that do our programming, customer service, etc., to develop testing methods to catch the issue in the future and make suggestions on how to fix the problem. All of this is a long-winded way of saying, getting to know a lot about one thing can be very cool. It comes with a lot more responsibility without the stress of feeling overwhelmed, as the knowledge makes problems a lot easier to approach,” Owens said.

In addition to his summer internship at HeathCo, Owens was recently hired as a Student Research Assistant at the WKU Center for Energy Systems where he works on corporate sponsored projects with world class companies. Projects include creating prototypes and market features for existing products and developing custom testbeds for industrial research labs.

Owens said that both applied learning opportunities are teaching him how to face a variety of challenges, something vital in his life as student as well as his future career in electrical engineering. 

For more information about a major in electrical engineering at WKU, visit: www.wku.edu/engineering.