The Smittcamp Family Honors College
Featured Scholar: Caleb Bahne
Caleb Bahne is a Mechnical Engineering major who entered the Smittcamp Family Honors College in 2022. Although he was projected to graduate this past May, he decided to put his academics on hold and gain work experience through the Lyles College of Engineering’s Valley Industry Partnership (VIP). Caleb shares his internship experience below.
Pictured above: Caleb Bahne and a cartoner he worked on while interning with BW Packaging.
"In November of 2025, as I neared the final year of my mechanical engineering studies, I made an unexpected decision. I hit pause on the classes that awaited me the next spring, said goodbye to my friends in the dorms, and exchanged my courses in machine design… for machine design. It was then that I accepted a position in the Lyles College of Engineering’s Valley Industry Partnership (VIP). The move lined me up for two six-month full-time internships, the first at BW Packaging, a global manufacturing company with a facility in Reedley, CA. Submitting my Leave of Absence from Fresno State was daunting, but given the opportunity awaiting me, it seemed like exactly the right call.
"I’ve always been one for a good project. As a kid, I spanned my backyard with paper marble runs, and come high school, I cooked up custom board games with my younger brother. So when it came time to pick a major, I opted for mechanical engineering, believing my courses would give me the greatest tools for the grandest projects. But as I approached the end of my studies at Fresno State, I couldn’t shake the feeling: my ability to translate ideas to reality wasn’t yet where I desired it. My education equipped me with an arsenal of analytical skills. But integrating those into a design? I still had a lot to learn.
"My previous projects had given me tastes of what it meant to engineer. In my two summers as an intern at California Controlled Atmosphere, I oversaw CAD models of 300+ component patents from concept to field deployment. As a research assistant in citrus harvesting robotics to Fresno State’s Dr. Bani Milhim, I fell in love with combining mechanisms and automation to solve problems. Now, I was hungry to go even deeper. I applied to VIP, interviewed with a pool of potential companies, and was blessed to be selected by BW Packaging. Their automation and design focus was exactly what I was hoping for.
Pictured right: Caleb Bahne poses with BW Packaging’s newest Bliss Former.
"I spent my first two weeks at BW “on the floor” building machines. Surrounded by thousands of parts eagerly awaiting their assembly, I looked down at the wrench in my hand and realized… how little I knew. I was the least experienced person in my new company. But to my deep appreciation, the folks at BW were willing to meet me where I was and train me. And boy was there a lot to learn.
"BW’s Reedley facility is special: they take custom packaging machines from design to fabrication and assembly, in-house. And to my great delight, I was given the chance to shadow all aspects of this process. I split a month of my time between fabrication and the floor, then spent the rest of my time in engineering.
"This experience trained me to see engineering in new ways. I saw through the eyes of an assembler, one servicing a machine under the time pressure of a halted assembly line. I saw through the eyes of a machinist, one who knows the unnecessary features that make parts costly to manufacture. And I saw through the eyes of an engineer, one who – if well trained and teachable – plans around the intricacies of each step of this process. To engineer is not to just model parts on a screen: it’s to conceptualize each component so well that its full life cycle is accounted for in advance.
"The folks at BW have not only given me new eyes to see; they’ve also entrusted me with real-world projects. I’ve designed pneumatic linkages for BW’s next generation bliss former, developed parts for the most urgent machines on the floor, and for the last 6 weeks of my internship, run point for all mechanical upgrades on a custom cartoner throughout its assembly.
Pictured left: Caleb Bahne works on ROSIE, the Fresno State robotics team's underwater
robot.
"For me, the VIP Program has been the difference between studying engineering and becoming an engineer. I entered BW knowing how to CAD. I leave knowing how to design. And it could not have come at a better time: this year, I’ve been serving as the mechanical lead of Fresno State’s new robotics team, directly applying what I’ve learned from VIP to our underwater robot, ROSIE. Our team recently advanced to the 2026 MATE ROV World Championships, becoming one of just 11 first-year teams to do so.
"As we leave for Newfoundland, Canada in the final week of June, I am reminded of how much I’ve grown. I’m confident that my engineering design skills have doubled – if not tripled – in the last six months.
"When I return from Canada, I plan to begin my second six month internship, this time at MEC Aerial Work Platforms in Kerman. I’m excited for another opportunity to adapt and grow in a new environment, and I’m deeply grateful for the council placed in my life that encouraged me to join the VIP Program. My experience in Smittcamp has been a huge part of this journey: it’s given me the flexibility to pursue my passion projects and shown me how to learn by exploring. It’s set me up to pursue the creative opportunities I believe God had in mind when he created me. That’s something I cherish."
From June 25-27, 2026, Caleb and other Fresno State student engineers (including the AVI Robotics team and representatives from the Lyles College of Engineering) traveled to St. John's, Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada to compete in the Pioneer Class at the 2026 MATE ROV World Championship. The international competition took place at the Fisheries and Marine Institute of Memorial University.
Fresno State placed in the top 5 in their division (4th of 11), and won "1st place" for the engineering presentation, scoring 102/100 on the presentation — the 11th highest score of all time.