During the past two summers, I interned at Corning Incorporated to gain firsthand exposure to early-stage development and day-to-day manufacturing—providing two completely different views of how the same company operates. In my first internship, I worked in operations engineering at a Corning Environmental Technologies plant, where I helped produce ceramic substrates for clean air applications. In my second internship, I worked in the Emerging Innovations Group, which exposed me to some of Corning’s developing products and industries.

Corning Glass Works was founded in 1851 and went through a series of names before landing on Corning Incorporated in 1989. During the interim, Corning developed several innovations, including the red-yellow-green stoplight system, Pyrex, the ribbon machine for automatic manufacturing of Thomas Edison’s light bulb, and fiber optics. Currently, Corning is perhaps best known for Gorilla Glass, which is used as a cover glass on a huge array of smartphones and other handheld electronic devices.