Purdue University · Industrial Engineering · B.S. May 2028

Ethan Pravato

I am an industrial engineering junior at Purdue, and manufacturing is where I want to work. Most of my time outside class goes to the Purdue Undergraduate Rocket Propulsion Laboratory. There I worked on the design of the kerosene impeller for the turbopump of a 5,000 lbf rocket engine. The impeller was metal 3D printed, and I ran the machining of the inducer that sits in front of it.

Last summer I was a water/wastewater intern at H2M Architects and Engineers. I kept finding engineers doing slow, manual work, so I built four AI tools that took the tedious parts out of their workflows. The most-used one was a watermain takeoff calculator.

I also co-founded Boiler Hot Mic with my friend Jordan. We interview Purdue students on campus and post the videos on Instagram and TikTok.

See the work Download resume
Ethan Pravato

Massapequa, NY → West Lafayette, IN

5,000 lbf rocket engine At the Purdue Undergraduate Rocket Propulsion Laboratory. I worked on the design of the kerosene impeller for its turbopump and ran the machining of the inducer.
4 AI tools Designed and shipped in a single internship summer
1,000+ machine-hours Recovered on CNC milling through time studies
11M+ views Across 125 posts and 10,000+ followers on a campus media brand I co-founded and built the tooling for

Selected work

Things I have actually shipped

Real tools with real users, not coursework. Where a project is a client or employer system I have described the outcome rather than published the code or screenshots.

$7,500 estimated annual saving
My own estimate, not the firm's. Roughly 15 takeoffs a year, two engineers on each, about five and a half hours apiece at $45 an hour. The tool costs nothing to run.

H2M Architects and Engineers · Summer 2026

Watermain Takeoff Calculator

Engineers were tracing pipe by hand in Bluebeam to count fittings and valves. I noticed the manual process during my first weeks and built a tool for it on my own time after work. It pulled true 3D pipe geometry straight out of Civil 3D, then auto-computed fittings, valves, pricing and restoration quantities from the model itself. A takeoff that could take up to six hours now takes about 20 minutes. Before engineers used it on real bids, its numbers were checked against manual takeoffs.

  • Python
  • Civil 3D
  • Geometry extraction
  • Cost estimation
The take-off tool's quantity totals view, with per-street pipe, fitting and valve tables
Quantity totals across a project, computed from the Civil 3D model.
Street-level view showing piping entry, fittings and cut-ins, and a live quantity summary
Street-level detail, with the Bluebeam write-up generated on the right.

Internal H2M tool. Client name, project number, street names and cost figures are blurred.

Siemens NX model of the kerosene impeller

Purdue Undergraduate Rocket Propulsion Laboratory · 2025 to present

Kerosene impeller and inducer, MARLIN turbopump

I worked on the design of the kerosene impeller for the turbopump of MARLIN, PURPL's 5,000 lbf LOX/kerosene gas-generator-cycle engine. A teammate and I worked out the blade geometry in CFturbo, and I built the model in Siemens NX. The impeller was metal 3D printed, so we designed it around the tolerances the print process could hold.

I also machined the inducer that sits in front of the impeller with a teammate, out of 7055 aluminum. We programmed it in Fusion 360 CAM for a Haas UMC-500SS at Purdue's Bechtel Innovation Design Center. The program has 16 operations, from facing and adaptive roughing to rotary blade passes and scallop finishing. The blades were cut with the part tilted on its side and turning on the rotary axis as the tool moved.

I ran the machining in the shop, from setup to cutting to measuring. Only two features had required tolerances. One was the outer diameter of 1.222 inches, so I measured it between passes and we adjusted the final pass to hit it. The other was the shaft bore, which we reamed to hold 0.001 inches for the rotary shaft. It took three runs to get a part in spec.

V1 is planned to hot-fire by the end of fall 2026. V2 is in design for a full integrated system test at Race2Space in summer 2027. I am now doing the CAD for a pump test stand, where an electric spindle spins the pump so the team can test for cavitation.

  • CFturbo
  • Siemens NX
  • Turbomachinery
  • Fusion 360 CAM
  • 4-axis rotary machining
  • Metal 3D printing

Manufacturing

End mill cutting the inducer blades, with chips and coolant across the machine table
Cutting the inducer blades.
Bandsaw cutting the finished inducer off the leftover aluminum stock
Cutting the finished inducer off the leftover aluminum stock on the bandsaw.
Two inducers side by side. The right one is the first article, the left one is the final part.
First article and final part. The inducer on the right is the first article. We refined the toolpath strategy from it, and the one on the left is the final part, in tolerance.
The two finished aluminum inducers after the final cut, sitting on a desk
The finished inducers after the final cut.

Team work The V1 turbopump is the whole PURPL pumps effort, not one person. My part of it was work on the kerosene impeller and the matching inducer above. This is what it adds up to.

The assembled V1 turbopump hardware laid out under studio lighting
The team's V1 turbopump build, laid out.
The assembled turbopump rotor, with the kerosene pump on one side and the LOX pump on the other
The assembled rotor, with the kerosene pump on one side and the LOX pump on the other.
Torch igniter firing on the test stand at night
Torch igniter test on the stand.

Purdue Momentum · Project Manager · 2026 to present

AccessPath

Course materials are mostly not accessible. A blind student hits a diagram with no alt text, an equation a screen reader pronounces as gibberish, a video with no transcript. Fixing it by hand means someone describing every figure in every lecture, and a single semester of one engineering course is hundreds of them.

AccessPath breaks uploaded course files into figures, equations, tables and text, sends each one to an AI model for an accessible draft, then lands every result in a queue where a TA or professor approves, edits, flags or regenerates it. Every version is kept with who changed it and when. The AI writes the first draft and a human signs off, so the product is really the review workflow rather than the model.

  • React
  • FastAPI
  • Postgres
  • Claude API
  • Accessibility / WCAG

The reviewer flow is clickable end to end today. The backend is in build and there are no users yet.

VendSmart operator dashboard showing machine fleet, revenue and restocking alerts VendSmart running on a phone-sized viewport

VendSmart · Co-founder · 2026 to present

Fleet monitoring for vending operators

A connected-machine retrofit for vending operators. My technical co-founder builds the hardware (an Arduino and IR-sensor retrofit kit). I own the operator app and go-to-market.

We pitch real operators on a $1,500 retrofit against $10,000+ for a new connected machine, with a model projecting 15 to 25% fewer service trips.

  • React Native
  • Expo
  • Firebase
  • Arduino
  • IoT
Live demo Source

The live demo has a one-click demo account, no signup needed.

Ethan and his co-founder Jordan on the Purdue campus with the Boiler Hot Mic microphone and sign
The Boiler Hot Mic dashboard showing 100 posts, 9.1M views, 194.5k likes and per-post performance pulled live from the Instagram API
The dashboard I built to run it. Every number is pulled live from the Instagram API.

Boiler Hot Mic · Co-founder · 2025 to present

Boiler Hot Mic

My friend Jordan and I take a microphone around Purdue and ask students one good question. That is the whole format. We started it in November 2025 with a sign, a mic stand and no audience, and it now runs at 10,000+ followers and 50k to 100k+ views per video.

The interesting part is what makes a question travel. Most of them do not. We keep a running bank of them and treat it like an experiment. The gap between a video that lands and one that does nothing is almost never the production. It is whether the question makes someone stop and answer it out loud.

It worked well enough to repeat. We spun the format into Campus Hot Mic, a multi-campus network running the same brand model at other schools, and we now run sponsored campaigns with brands. I lead a team of 5 interns and teach them filming and editing.

We were running all of this out of a spreadsheet, so I built the dashboard we operate from now. It pulls every post straight from the Instagram API, currently 125 posts and 11M+ views, and puts the content calendar, question bank, sponsorships and finances in one place. Answering "which questions actually work" went from an afternoon of scrolling to a sorted column.

It is password-gated, since it holds our sponsorship and revenue numbers, so there is no public demo of it here.

  • Content strategy
  • Growth
  • Brand partnerships
  • JavaScript
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • Meta Graph API
@boilerhotmic

Also built

H2M · Summer 2026

Project Plan Generator

An LLM-powered tool that drafts the firm's 12-section project plan from source documents. On track to cut what can be an 8-hour manual process down to roughly one hour, for 50+ project managers firm-wide.

  • FastAPI
  • Claude API
  • python-docx
  • Ollama

H2M · Summer 2026

Field Inspector iPad App

An iPad field app for watermain inspection, with GPS basemap markups and AI-polished inspection photo captions. Now in active field beta with real inspectors.

  • iPad
  • Cloudflare
  • GPS / mapping

H2M · Summer 2026

Historical Bid Analysis

A Claude API and SQLite tool that makes 25 years of the firm's historical bid data queryable in plain English, so engineers can sanity-check new numbers against decades of precedent.

  • Python
  • SQLite
  • Claude API
  • Tool use

Personal · 2026

Semester Dashboard

Six courses, six syllabi, three separate grade portals. This merges every deadline and exam into one calendar and pulls live grades from Brightspace, Gradescope and Variate, so I stop losing time to checking three sites to answer one question.

  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • Scrapers
  • SQLite

Personal · 2026

MyMitzvahs

A BeReal-style habit app for Jewish observance, built in React Native with a Cloudflare Workers and D1 backend. Backend is live and the app is in tester recruitment.

  • React Native
  • Expo
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • D1
Source

Experience

Where I have worked

  1. Jun 2026 – Aug 2026

    H2M Architects and Engineers

    Water/Wastewater Engineering Intern, AI Automation Initiative · Melville, NY

    • Independently designed and built 4 AI tools in one summer that automated real firm workflows, covering watermain quantity takeoffs, field inspection, project-plan drafting and historical bid analysis.
    • Earned selection as the only intern of 65 on H2M's AI Readiness Committee, the firm's cross-divisional group building and evaluating AI solutions company-wide.
    • Supported live projects across the full lifecycle, including pre-design field surveys, DOH submittals, bid tab prep, construction administration, on-site construction observation and CAD-drafted project closeout record maps.
  2. Sep 2026 – present

    Purdue Momentum

    Project Manager, AccessPath · West Lafayette, IN

    • Lead a team of 8 software engineering students building AccessPath, a course accessibility tool that drafts accessible versions of lecture materials with AI and routes every one of them through human approval.
    • Recruited the team by designing and running a nine-candidate technical interview process, and own scope and priorities across a FastAPI, Postgres and Claude API stack.
  3. Aug 2025 – present

    Purdue Undergraduate Rocket Propulsion Laboratory

    Pumps Design and Manufacturing Engineer · West Lafayette, IN

    • Worked on the design of the kerosene impeller for the turbopump of a 5,000 lbf LOX/kerosene gas-generator-cycle engine, contributing to the blade design in CFturbo and building the full part in Siemens NX for metal 3D printing.
    • Machined the inducer with a teammate at Purdue's Bechtel Innovation Design Center, programming the toolpaths in Fusion 360 CAM and measuring between passes to hold its required tolerances.
    • V1 is planned to hot-fire by the end of fall 2026, and V2 is in design for Race2Space in summer 2027. Now doing the CAD for a pump test stand for cavitation testing.
  4. Summer 2024 & Winter 2024–25

    Nelson + Pope

    Civil Engineering Intern · Melville, NY

    • Produced basemaps for utility, roadway, drainage and sewer infrastructure in Autodesk Civil 3D.
    • Evaluated on-site drainage systems with a team of interns to inform roadway and drainage improvement designs.
  5. Jun 2023 – Aug 2023

    Designatronics Inc.

    Manufacturing Engineering Intern · Hicksville, NY

    • Ran time studies on CNC milling operations to locate manufacturing throughput bottlenecks, cutting 1,000+ machine-hours.
    • Built working relationships with the technicians on the floor. Their read on how each machine actually ran is what pointed me at the inefficiencies the numbers were showing.
    • Identified a recurring defect through regular check-ins with the quality control team, then designed a cleaning device in SOLIDWORKS that lowered the scrap rate across thousands of parts.
  6. Jul 2020 – present

    Freelance Drone Operator

    Owner and operator, solo aerial media business · Massapequa, NY

    • Built a solo aerial media business to $11,000+ in revenue licensing footage to Daily Mail, NewsNation and ABC News, with one clip used in a Netflix documentary.
    • Owned every part of the operation, from client acquisition through post-production.

Leadership

Purdue Momentum

Project Manager, AccessPath. Lead a team of 8 software engineering students, recruited through a nine-candidate technical interview process I designed and ran, and own scope and priorities across the build.

Alpha Epsilon Pi

External Relations Chair, Dec 2024 to May 2026. Managed an $8,000+ annual budget and led a committee running 30+ events a year, some with 500+ attendees, negotiating performer and vendor contracts and partnering across 24 fraternities and 19 sororities.

Boy Scouts of America

Eagle Scout with Bronze Palm. Served as Senior Patrol Leader.

Capabilities

What I work with

Programming and AI

  • Python
  • R
  • C
  • MATLAB
  • SQL
  • Anthropic Claude API
  • LLM tool and agent integration
  • AI workflow automation
  • Git and GitHub
  • PostgreSQL
  • SQLite
  • Cloudflare Workers

Process and analysis

  • Lean Green Belt
  • 5S
  • Time and motion study
  • Throughput and bottleneck analysis
  • IBM SPSS
  • Data visualization
  • ArcGIS
  • Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, Access, Outlook)

CAD and manufacturing

  • SOLIDWORKS
  • Siemens NX
  • CFturbo
  • Autodesk Inventor, Fusion, Civil 3D, Revit
  • Teamcenter PDM
  • GD&T
  • G-code
  • CNC milling and CAM (Fusion 360)
Sectioned Siemens NX view of the kerosene impeller

About

A bit more

I am an industrial engineering junior at Purdue's Edwardson School, graduating May 2028, and I want to work in manufacturing. Almost everything people use was made in a factory, from cars and phones to rockets. How it was made decides what it costs, how well it works and how fast it can be built.

That is why I think industrial engineers matter more now than ever. More companies are trying to build hardware in the U.S., and launch companies are building rockets at rates nobody planned for a decade ago. Someone has to find where time and material are being wasted and fix the process. That is the work IE trains you to do.

I have seen it up close. At Designatronics I ran time studies on CNC mills and worked with the technicians and the quality control team to find where the process was losing time and parts. At PURPL I ran the machining of a turbopump inducer, and our toolpath changes between runs cut the cycle time from 45 minutes to 29.

The same habit shows up in my software. At H2M I watched engineers trace pipe by hand in Bluebeam when the geometry was already in the Civil 3D model, so I built a tool to pull it out. Most of what I build works that way. The work is already happening, and I take the tedious part out of the middle of it.

I am looking for a Summer 2027 industrial engineering internship in manufacturing, ideally in aerospace or defense. I am a U.S. citizen and willing to relocate.

Get in touch Resume (PDF)