On track for success: BNSF’s summer intern program continues to grow

Tkai Wade’s interest in the railroad started back when he was little. His grandparents lived in Hope, Arkansas, a large railroad hub, so Tkai got to see plenty of trains growing up. This interest, coupled with his love for building LEGO® sets and working with remote-controlled cars, ultimately led him to eventually pursue mechanical engineering. 

Wade serves as an engineering intern with the track department and said each day of his internship brought new opportunities. He’s stationed in Wichita, Kansas, but reports to the depot in Augusta. His internship has provided travel opportunities, including Kansas City and a look at the Argentine hump yard.  

Wade has been able to learn about incident response processes and track maintenance, and shadow employees from multiple teams. 

“I get to go and look at different projects to see which part of BNSF I want to join,” he said.  

For Wade, this internship has been the fulfillment of a childhood dream.  

Hali Burnett – Texas Christian University 

Hali Burnett is an English major on a prelaw track and found out about BNSF through her college career center. She realized the internship could be an important career steppingstone.  

“I could still get very important concrete legal experience before I get to law school, so that's what really drew me to this position specifically,” she said. “I'm not exactly sure what type of law I want to get into, so being able to get so intimately familiar with contract law was such a great opportunity. I had to apply.”  

Throughout her summer, Burnett has been familiarizing herself with terms and legal language to tackle one of her capstone projects, which included a hefty amount of case analysis. To support this time-consuming work, Burnett and her partner on the project made an AI agent that helped review and evaluate large volumes of material.  

Burnett also had the opportunity to support a case arbitration, traveling to Phoenix to help represent BNSF.  

“We’ve had two mock arbitrations with assistant vice presidents who really put us through the ringer, getting us ready, throwing everything they have at us to really see what our styles are, how we form arguments, what we're like under pressure and what kind of rebuttals we think of,” she said. “So, that's been such a surreal experience to be able to do that after only being here for a month.”  

Burnett said her internship has been a different learning environment from what she’s used to in college, but one that has greatly benefited her in just two short months.  

“When I come into work every day, I am doing something different,” she said. “I'm learning something new and I'm getting to do something hands-on that requires me to understand what I learned 30 minutes before. So, it's been very fast-paced and has pushed me outside of my comfort zone, which I think is very good. It’s been a great part of this position.”  

Philip Broski – Texas Christian University 

Philip Broski is studying accounting, finance and political science as he begins to wrap up his college tenure at TCU. He has always been interested in aspects of accounting and grew even more interested once he started taking his first couple of accounting classes.  

He heard positive feedback from others who worked at BNSF, so he decided to apply for the tax internship within the finance department.  

Over the summer, Broski spent much of his time analyzing tax returns, managing calculations and ensuring data consistency and accuracy.  

One of his contributions included automating part of a tax review process.  

“I was working with the property tax team, and we were having to manually go through these pivot tables in Excel, where we would carry over information from one Excel spreadsheet to another,” he said. “I found a way to automate the process, so the spreadsheets are generated automatically, which significantly reduced the time required to update our mileage information.”  

Broski hopes to complete his degree soon and work in public accounting. His advice to next year’s interns is to communicate and look for ways to be innovative within their team.