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Jacob Willette

Mechanical Engineer

Mechanical Equipment Engineer, Entegris

BSME Wentworth Institute of Technology 2022, Magna Cum Laude

Former Mechanical Engineering Intern Savant Systems Inc.

Former Quality and Continuous Improvement Intern ABB Inc.

Contact

The best way to contact me is through email: jacobcwillette@gmail.com

Social

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcwillette/

About

My name is Jacob Christopher Willette, I am a Mechanical Engineer from Auburn, Maine who attended Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts.

Since High School, I have been a person who is passionate about science and engineering. Knowing that my home public school would not satisfy my interests, for my secondary education, I elected to travel an hour away from my hometown to attend Baxter Academy for Technology and Science. At this school, I was exposed to several technical classes such as computer-aided design (CAD), calculus-based physics, and programming with excel. However, perhaps the most important opportunity this school gave me was the program known as “Flex Friday”. On every Friday, Baxter students had the entire day to work on a year-long project in groups ranging in size from one to thirty people. My Fridays for all four years of High School were dedicated to the school’s world-class FIRST Robotics Competition team, 5687 “The Outliers“. Every year this team was tasked with building a unique robot from scratch in only a matter of six weeks. This robot would then compete against others in New England and if we qualified (which we did every year I was on the team) against teams all over the world. My role on the team was Project Manager, so I was in charge of organizing the group and directing our focus to ensure we were on time, made an effective robot, and that we maintained our professional demeanor win or lose (this was the hardest responsibility). In 2018 I graduated with a GPA of 3.8 and was elected by my peers to speak at graduation (there was no class rank at Baxter). During my junior year, I also passed two Solidworks Certification Exams, The Associates level certification and the Professionals Level certification (CSWA and CSWP respectively). In 2021 The Outliers became a separate entity from Baxter in the form of a 501(c)(3) and invited me back as a member of the board of directors.

In college at Wentworth Institute of Technology, I have maintained my passions and excelled in my field. I have consistently earned a spot on the dean’s list every semester and got A’s in all my technical classes including Fluids, Thermodynamics II, and Differential Calculus. Wentworth is home to one of the largest 3D Printing facilities in the nation and offers a technical elective called Additive Manufacturing. In the spring of 2020, I took this course and received one of the only Additive Manufacturing Certifications in existence. On top of these achievements, I have also continued my extracurricular career. I have been a critical member of Wentworth’s Chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) every year and from 2019 to present. I am the club’s president in charge of directing it’s vision and projects. Our current project, the Robot in 3 Days challenge (Ri3D) is the colligate version of FRC, continuing my work from high school. The purpose of Ri3D is to create a robot for high schoolers to see and derive inspiration for their own competition. Our Ri3D team is the first in the region and we hope it will draw attention to our school. Apart from technical clubs, I was also the Wentworth Student Government (WSG) Academic Affairs Officer. In this position, I was the interface between the student government and every academic department of the school. I had various responsibilities including, solving students’ curriculum problems, directing my peers to the correct faculty members to answer questions, and chairing the Campus Communication Committee. Additionally, I met with the institute’s provost biweekly and with the faculty senate monthly to discuss WSG and student Issues. This was a very rewarding position because I had the opportunity to meet a variety of our institution’s wonderful individuals and gain many insights into how the school runs.

My university offers me the unique opportunity to go on internships during the latter part of my degree. I was lucky enough to secure my first internship at an ABB Inc. plant in my hometown. I was hired at ABB as a Quality and Continuous Improvement Intern. Although this was my first engineering position and my experience was non-existent, I found my niche making several automated excel spreadsheets related to Quality systems like document control, discipline tracking, and calibration control. Additionally, I had the chance to flex my CAD muscles in the professional world by designing tool gauging and a custom whiteboard solution. As a quality intern, I had the experience of seeing the interface between design engineers and manufacturing engineers. Often I would read drawings and have to interpret design intent from very little information besides a document name and how tight a tolerance was. I would frequently see prints that were contradictory or ambiguous and help other quality technicians decide whether the manufactured part was viable for the customer.

My second internship was at Savant Systems in Hyannis MA. While employed there, I had various duties supporting the mechanical engineering team in the design of high-end smart home electronics. My time at ABB helped me design manufacturable parts at Savant, as proven by the number of projects I worked on that involved injection molded parts, PCBA layouts, and prototype fabrication. Among the many skills I developed there, Savant developed my 3D design capabilities, record keeping (e.g. engineering notebook, revision management, BOM creation), and multidisciplinary teamwork the most. Additionally, Savant often gave me the opportunity to interact with outside engineering firms on behalf of the company for custom designs and consulting. The Co-Op was a valuable introduction to the world of mechanical engineering design and truly rounded off my college Co-Op experience.

After graduating college in 2022, I began my career at Entegris in Bedford, MA. At Entegris, I am a Mechanical Equipment Engineer and my job is to design improvements for equipment that manufactures filter membrane for the semiconductor industry. My typical work-flow at this job starts by learning about problems with the equipment from process engineers or my manager (all of whom are not mechanical engineers). From that point, it is my responsibility to independently design mechanical solutions to these problems, preform design reviews with the stake holders, create drawing packages for quote and manufacture, and finally oversee installation or iteration. Essentially, I am responsible for the full product life cycle for my designs and have a great deal of independence in my engineering. At this job, I use Solidworks, Solidworks PDM, and the Microsoft Suite every day; and I use Solidworks FEA, GD&T, and do engineering calculations several times a week.

Outside of the classroom and the workplace, I have several non-technical interests. I almost exclusively listen to music at least twice my age (this is by no means a rule). My favorite artists include The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin among others. As an engineer, I have a natural desire to communicate and as a result, I am always learning about how to communicate in new ways. One way I do this is by learning about other languages and how language evolves. Did you know that English is the only language that separates the words for a meat from the animal it comes from? (e.g. pork and pig or beef and cow). This comes from the language disparity of upper-class French-speaking monarchs in 11th century England, who only saw the animals as food, vs lower-class old English-speaking peasants, who raised the animals for the monarchs. Over the years their languages became one and this anomaly along with many other French-derived words were added to a previously Germanic language (read more here). This kind of fact fascinates me and makes me want to study other languages in great detail.