Release Date: 08/17/2017
For BART engineering interns, a focus on safety, reliability and innovation
Image above: BART intern Colin McGill doing field work for the Track Department
When Armen Chouldjian returns to UC Berkeley in the fall, he’ll ride BART knowing his summer job helped increase safety and reliability for all the transit system’s riders. Chouldjian is one of 11 engineering interns selected from more than 200 college students around the nation who applied to work in the Maintenance and Engineering Department.For their summer project, Armen Chouldjian and Anuj Shah, from the University of Cincinnati, were asked to take information-dense reports generated from various BART computer systems and make them more readable and accessible. They went far beyond, creating an internal web application that is already being used for greater efficiency and quicker diagnosis and resolution of problems. “It’s a win-win,” said Chouldjian, who is studying electrical engineering and computer science. “I get to play with cool technology and it ends up helping people.” It’s a win for BART, too, which is facing a brain drain with nearly half of current employees at retirement age, because it helps build a pipeline of skilled engineers who bring fresh ideas and new approaches to the agency. Read the full story and get more photos here.
