#MyFirstJob: Kelly Welsh

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Posted on July 29, 2019

Bob Lowry

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#MyFirstJob is a series focused on University of South Alabama Class of 2019 graduates who are beginning their careers.

As Kelly Welsh recalls, it all started in Philadelphia.

She was there as a college student, attending the Society of Women Engineers annual conference (“which I would HIGHLY recommend”) and she was looking for an internship. “I went through an informal greeting process and then got called back for a formal callback,” Welsh said. She got the internship, and for the next two summers she worked at Chevron.

“I learned SO much,” Welsh said. “My first year was management heavy, as I started working on projects from the planning period to completion out on the oil platform. I learned how to perform job safety analysis and how to walk crews down the job before it is performed. I learned how the selection process worked for contracting out third parties and how to get a budget approved for capital projects.

“The second role, a reliability engineer, taught me how to perform various non-destructive examinations on fixed equipment. For example, I learned how to use a drone to inspect tanks and how to use ultrasonic testing to inspect corrosion on piping. I learned how to perform root-cause analysis when we had an instance of production loss which in turn prevents the same thing happening again.”

Those two internship years prepared Welsh for the big day when she went to work fulltime right after graduating this spring with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of South Alabama College of Engineering. Today, she’s a reliability engineer at Georgia-Pacific’s cellulose facility in New Augusta, Miss., just a few miles outside Hattiesburg, and about 70 miles from the USA campus.

“As a reliability engineer, my job is to prevent production loss and machine failures,” she explained. “For example, I monitor the vibration of the equipment – if we see a high velocity vibration on a pump or motor, for instance, my job is to figure out why, followed by figuring out how to prevent it from occurring again. I work a lot with maintenance and control operators to figure out root causes.”

The root cause of Welsh’s early success in landing a job may be tied to her educational experience at South that included networking, such as serving as the outreach coordinator for USA’s Society of Women Engineers chapter.

“I made multiple connections with various companies as every month we had a meeting with a speaker. It also engaged me in the community as we were encouraged to volunteer for events such as GEMS for STEM,” Welsh said. “Not only did the monthly meetings encourage me to network, but the annual conference taught me how to write a proper resume, dress in business attire and learn how to use the STAR – Situation, Task, Action, Result – method when answering interview questions. Ultimately, it is the reason I got where I am today!”

Originally from Jonesboro, Ark., Welsh first came to Mobile to participate in the Distinguished Young Women national scholarship program. She toured South with other event participants and decided to stay. “I chose USA because I felt like given its size and type of people I would feel welcomed and encouraged to succeed.”

And succeed she did at South. Between the academic challenges and the extracurricular activities, the pace was occasionally frantic. Work, by comparison, is, well, sort of easy.

“Honestly, school being so stressful at times makes my job now hardly feel like work,” she said. “You may feel like you’re broke, stressed and exhausted, but it truly is worth it. School prepares you to manage your time. If I hadn’t learned how to collaborate with a team to meet project deadlines in school, I wouldn’t have been prepared for the job. Also, the money is great but just remember…you also have A LOT of bills so don’t get in over your head about thinking you’re rich!”

Perhaps because she’s accustomed to multiple, ongoing projects going all the way back to South, Welsh is staying busy after work, too, volunteering and playing piano at her church and hoping to be involved with a local Boys and Girls Club or similar organization.

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