The U.S. Army provides a variety of developmental and educational opportunities for enlisted personnel, civilians, and students.
Recent graduate Rosina Bray is currently participating in an Army civilian sponsored internship program.
Bray, from Maryland, graduated with a Bachelor in Materials Science and Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio and began an internship program at the Army Evaluation Center (AEC) in August of 2022.
AEC, “Produces unbiased, independent safety and operational evaluations to enable the Army to dominate in the multi-domain operational environment,” according to its website.
Bray spent the first year of her internship at AEC learning about acquisition. She explains the role of an evaluator.
“The purpose of AEC is to evaluate the technology and materiel solutions that are coming into the Army and making sure they meet specific requirements, ensuring that if they can fill a capabilities gap, which one do they fill, and if they don’t fill it completely how much can they do,” adding, “Generally, we make sure it’s good quality and will help protect our Soldiers.”
Now Bray is fulfilling another requirement of the program which calls for her to spend a six-month detail at a test center. That led her to Cold Regions Test Center at Fort Greely, Alaska in October. The test center falls under Yuma Proving Ground’s umbrella of extreme weather testing.
“I wanted to go to a test center because that’s the other half that fits in very well with the stuff that AEC does. We make the recommendations and capability documents for what we need, in addition to getting some details of the general test plan laid out but it’s a very basic overview of the testing.”
Bray would like to dig deeper into the process outside of the paperwork AEC receives. She imagines she’ll be assisting with test planning, spending some time in the field and other times in the office to make sure she’s communicating about the progress and the importance of arctic testing.
“I want to see how the cold affects an item. Because it’s not something that a lot of people have a lot of emphasis on, and I would like to take this knowledge back to help system acquisition. To make more of a case as to why cold weather testing is applicable to their systems, and why they really should do it. Especially if they are trying to operate in a cold weather environment.”
On day one of Bray’s time at CRTC she was meeting the team she would be spending the next six months with learning from and working together.
“Everyone has been really nice and more than welcoming to help me get acclimated and started to get me onboarded to various projects.”
Date Taken: | 12.05.2023 |
Date Posted: | 12.05.2023 10:03 |
Story ID: | 458377 |
Location: | YUMA PROVING GROUND, ARIZONA, US |
Web Views: | 263 |
Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Work development assignments provide growth opportunities, by Ana Henderson, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.