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

I build the tool
instead of filing
a ticket.

I am an industrial engineering junior at Purdue. Last summer I was hired as a water/wastewater intern and ended up independently designing and shipping four AI tools that automated real workflows at a multidiscipline engineering firm. The one nobody asked me to build, a watermain takeoff calculator, ended up the most-used tool on the team.

When I am not writing software I am designing the kerosene impeller for a gas-generator turbopump feeding a 5,000 lbf rocket engine.

See the work Download resume
Ethan Pravato

Massapequa, NY → West Lafayette, IN

5,000 lbf rocket engine The turbopump I design the kerosene impeller for, at Purdue's propulsion lab
4 AI tools Designed and shipped in a single internship summer
1,000+ machine-hours Recovered per CNC machine through time studies
9.1M views Across 100 posts 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.

$8,100 estimated annual saving
My own estimate, not the firm's. Roughly 15 takeoffs a year, two engineers on each, about 6 hours apiece at $45 an hour. The tool costs nothing to run.

H2M Architects and Engineers · Summer 2026

Watermain Takeoff Calculator

Estimators were tracing pipe by hand in Bluebeam to count fittings and valves. I pulled true 3D pipe geometry straight out of Civil 3D instead, then auto-computed fittings, valves, pricing and restoration quantities from the model itself.

Nobody asked me to build this. I noticed the manual process during my first weeks and self-initiated it. It became the most-used tool I made that summer.

  • Python
  • Civil 3D
  • Geometry extraction
  • Cost estimation

Internal firm tool. Code and screenshots not published.

Siemens NX model of the turbopump housing assembly

Purdue Undergraduate Rocket Propulsion Lab · 2025 to present

Kerosene impeller, 5,000 lbf turbopump

I design the kerosene impeller for a gas-generator-cycle turbopump feeding a 5,000 lbf LOX/kerosene engine. Blade geometry and flow performance are modeled in CFturbo, then translated into manufacturable geometry in Siemens NX.

I also manufacture the matching inducer, machining and integrating hardware to tight tolerance, strength and interface requirements. We are iterating into V2 on a team pursuing the first undergraduate turbopump hot-fire.

  • CFturbo
  • Siemens NX
  • Turbomachinery
  • GD&T
  • Machining

Designing it is half the job. The other half is making it, finding out what the machine actually does to your geometry, and running it again.

End mill cutting the inducer geometry, with chips and coolant across the machine table
Cutting the inducer profile. Chips and coolant, mid-operation.
Bandsaw parting the finished inducer off its billet stock
Parting the finished part off the billet on the bandsaw.
Two inducers side by side. The right one was cut too deep, the left one is the corrected re-cut.
The one I actually learn from. The inducer on the right is the first attempt. We cut too deep on it. The one on the left is the redone version, cut correctly.

Team work The V1 turbopump is the whole PURPL pumps effort, not one person. My part of it is 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, turbine wheel at one end and the pump end at the other
The assembled rotor, turbine wheel on one end and the pump end on the other.
Torch igniter firing on the test stand at night
Torch igniter test on the stand.
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 React Native 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 roughly 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.

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 100 posts and 9.1M 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

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

  • React
  • TypeScript
  • 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 estimators 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 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 and on-site construction observation, which included field-resolving an unexpected asbestos pipe encounter.
  2. Aug 2025 – present

    Purdue Undergraduate Rocket Propulsion Lab

    Pumps Team · West Lafayette, IN

    • Designing the kerosene impeller for a gas-generator-cycle turbopump feeding a 5,000 lbf LOX/kerosene engine.
    • Manufacturing and integrating the matching inducer to tight tolerance, strength and interface requirements.
  3. Jun 2024 – Jan 2025

    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.
  4. Jun 2023 – Aug 2023

    Designations Inc.

    Mechanical Engineering Intern · Hicksville, NY

    • Ran time studies on CNC milling operations to locate throughput bottlenecks, cutting 1,000+ machine-hours per machine.
    • Designed a product in SOLIDWORKS that eliminated a recurring defect across thousands of milled parts.
  5. 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

Alpha Epsilon Pi

External Relations Chair. Manage an $8,000+ annual budget and lead a committee running 30+ events a year, some with 500+ attendees, negotiating performer and vendor contracts.

Boy Scouts of America

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

Capabilities

What I work with

Programming and AI

  • Python
  • C
  • MATLAB
  • SQL
  • Anthropic Claude API
  • LLM tool and agent integration
  • Git and GitHub

Building software

  • FastAPI
  • Streamlit
  • PostgreSQL
  • SQLite
  • React
  • React Native
  • TypeScript
  • Cloudflare Workers

Process and analysis

  • Lean Six Sigma Green Belt
  • Time and motion study
  • Throughput and bottleneck analysis
  • IBM SPSS
  • Excel
  • Data visualization
  • ArcGIS

CAD and manufacturing

  • SOLIDWORKS
  • Siemens NX
  • Ansys
  • CFturbo
  • Autodesk Inventor, Fusion, Civil 3D, Revit
  • Teamcenter PDM
  • GD&T
  • G-code and CNC milling
Sectioned Siemens NX view of the turbopump housing

About

A bit more

I am an industrial engineering junior at Purdue's Edwardson School, graduating May 2028. What I like about IE is that it is the discipline that asks why a process looks the way it does. Most of what I have built started with noticing somebody doing something by hand that a computer should be doing.

That is literally how the takeoff calculator happened. I was watching estimators trace pipe in Bluebeam and thought the geometry was already sitting in the Civil 3D model. Nobody assigned it to me. It ended up being the most-used tool I built that summer.

The pattern repeats. Most of what I build is not a new product, it is a tool that makes something I am already running work better. A takeoff that took hours of tracing, a project plan that took eight, a media brand run out of a spreadsheet, a semester spread across three grade portals. In every case the work was already happening and already understood. I just took the tedious part out of the middle of it.

I am equally comfortable away from a keyboard. I have run time studies on a shop floor, stood on a construction site when we hit unexpected asbestos pipe, machined turbopump hardware to tight tolerance, and run a drone business that licensed footage to national news outlets before I could legally rent a car.

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

Get in touch Resume (PDF)