ROSEMEAD >> It wasn’t until the second to last day of Jacob Lovi’s summer internship at Boeing that he finally got his supervisors to take him seriously on some ideas he had to improve efficiency, but the company is glad they did. After researching Lovi’s ideas, the company found it would save tens of thousands of dollars on every satellite by implementing them, and those savings would top $1 million within the next five to ten years.

Boeing, represented by the test and evaluation division’s chief engineer, Robert Stefan, Jr., honored Lovi, who lives in Monrovia and is a senior at the Don Bosco Technical Institute, with a satellite coin (a traditional way in the field to reward “significant accomplishments”) along with a certificate of appreciation at a character assembly at Bosco Tech on Thursday morning.

“He came up with these ideas and these changes are actually going to make our satellites significantly cheaper to build,” Stefan said. “If you’re a five- … ten-year employee in our company, that’s great. If you’re a high school intern, that’s remarkable. Remarkable.”

Specifically, Lovi’s ideas focused on a time-wasting setup within the company that specifically dealt with its storage and use of shims (a type of washer that’s used to build satellites). He noticed that they were labeled randomly, rather than a more logical smallest-to-largest lineup, which required technicians to read loads of documents to make sure they had the correct shims. The documents themselves were a problem, too — a lot of them were redundant, and sifting through them also wasted time. Finally, Lovi noticed the shims were all stored in one huge box without any real organization, which required engineers to measure every single shim to make sure they had one that would fit. By organizing the storage system and removing shim sizes that weren’t necessary, Lovi noticed that even more time could be saved.

He tried many times to persuade his supervisors about these ideas and was rebuffed more than once. “I was told ‘no’ many times, that it wouldn’t work, that it would never get off the ground,” Lovi said, until Stefan and his colleagues agreed to look into it.

Since that happened on Lovi’s second to last day, he didn’t have the opportunity to push the idea forward, but another intern put together a plan after Lovi left, and that will be fully implemented by March.

Lovi credits a combination of luck and persistence with the accomplishment.

“I realize that a lot of other interns put a lot of time into their work and did impressive work, too, on their summer internships at Boeing and other companies,” he said. “In some ways I was lucky to get the right place at the right time, and because of my tenacious attitude and my willingness to keep pushing forward that really brought these ideas to light.”

Stefan applauded Lovi as an example for all of his fellow high schoolers to emulate.

“He’s an outstanding student, an outstanding intern for us, and what makes him outstanding is he took advantage of his opportunity,” Stefan said. “Now I’m here to tell you that every time you get an opportunity, you need to take advantage of it. … It’s your future, and you’re going to have to make that future, so do what Jacob did. Take advantage of your opportunities and every one of you, if you seize the opportunity, I’m sure great things will happen for you.”