Aerospace Engineering Internship Story: Gulfstream Aerospace

Julia Menzel
Aerospace Engineering

This past summer, I interned with Gulfstream Aerospace in Savannah, Georgia. I had originally applied to their Innovation, Engineering, and Flight Summer Internship on their website. A month after I applied, Gulfstream had some representatives visiting Auburn’s campus. I just finished class and was on my way to get coffee when I made the impulse decision to visit their table in Brown Kopel. It was only moments into the conversation that one of the representatives offered me an interview time for the following day. After that initial interview, I didn’t hear anything from Gulfstream for about a month until one day I woke up to a text message offering me a second interview. This interview was over a Microsoft Teams video call and was with a department manager and a person from their collegiate relations team. They told me I would hear back within a week, but they called later that day offering me the intern position.

After 12 weeks of being a systems engineering and integration intern, I learned more than I could have expected. The projects I worked on varied between working with excel spreadsheets, writing standard operating procedures, reviewing 3D models, and communicating with engineering teams and procurement teams. From these tasks, the most important thing I learned was to consistently communicate with others to avoid confusion and improve project efficiency. My favorite part was that Gulfstream provided endless opportunities for interns to tour each manufacturing facility and flight test hangar so we could see the beautiful private jets. I think that this internship helped me prepare for life after Auburn by demonstrating how important it is that you like the people you work with. Some projects and tasks can be the most interesting thing, but if your team cannot work together, the project loses all of its excitement. Classes at Auburn helped me throughout my internship by knowing how to balance and organize my workload. Overall, my advice to other students would be to do more than just send an online application but show up to career fairs and actually communicate with someone from the company face to face.