August 24 - Canadian Pacific

For the past three weeks, I have been interning at Canadian Pacific in the Product Design department. When I was initially invited for an interview, the department name confused me. I was under the impression that CP transported goods via railway, so I wasn’t even sure if I was working with the renowned Canadian Pacific, or an ambiguous company with the same name.

In reality, what we do here in Product Design is handle the logistics of the railway. The team works together to design and effectively utilize our Integrated Operating Plan and Local Servicing Operating Plan so our trains can reach customers on time.

Today was somewhat of a typical day. I rushed in and sat at my cubicle with a coffee in hand, taking time to greet several friendly co-workers. At the moment, I am finishing up an informative presentation on CP’s Newtown subdivision that I have been researching with my Shad internship buddy, Betty Wang. We will be presenting a condensed version to the PD department soon, and the full deck will be posted to the share drive for future reference.

On the days that I didn’t work on projects and assignments, I had the opportunity to job shadow people within PD and other departments. Everyone I met was friendly, and explained their jobs very clearly to me, taking the time to voluntarily show me some interesting things about our railway. As well, I was allowed to tour the Calgary Intermodal Facility yard for a day. Seeing the actual trains that we were discussing and planning the routes for was fascinating. I even got to ride in a Reach Stacker, a huge crane-like machine that transferred the intermodal containers to the train cars.

Overall, I am very grateful that I was selected to work here at Canadian Pacific. The friendly environment coupled with the interesting work I was given has made this an amazing learning experience.

Alison Wong
Hometown: Calgary, AB