Career Exploration

During my time in the engineering program, I have met a number of industry professionals through workplace field trips and guest speakers.

One of the first guest speakers I had the pleasure of listening to was Maynard Holliday, the senior technical advisor to the US Secretary of Defense. The main focus of his talk centered around his work in analyzing and repairing the nuclear power plant, Chernobyl, after its explosion in 1986. As he described the details of how he and his team spent numerous attempts trying to figure out how to deal with an amount of radiation the world had never seen before, I was amazed by their teamwork, and admired how much determination was put into the project. After many failed attempts, Holliday and his team were finally able to engineer a radiation resistant camera attached to a robot that could go inside the plant safely. The robot would gather images and data that allowed the engineers outside to properly diagnose what repairs were needed to fix the power plant. This guest talk gave me interesting insight on the different projects engineers could work on throughout their career, and inspired me to always work towards a solution, even when it seems there might not be any.

Another guest speaker I heard from was Jason Yonsinski, a Harvard graduate who spoke mainly about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Using Python and Cleverbot, he demonstrated how a computer could have a conversation with us, or even another computer. Using machine learning, he showed us a Quadritot, or four-legged robot baby, that took over 180 iterations of random movements to figure out how to move the quickest and furthest distance. Lastly, we were shown a program that could detect and identify different faces, text, animals, and objects using AI. What I found interesting was that he said it only took him a weekend to create the working program, but three months to turn it into a user-friendly interface. This guest speaker gave me a really cool introduction to AI and machine learning, and expanded my imagination on the different, fun projects I could create in the future.

Other guest speakers I listened to were BSK Associates, who talked about all the ways that geologists and Geotech engineers work together. Using different moisture contents and samples of different soils, geologists and engineers are able to figure out how to get the right density for making buildings on. This is especially important when building structures in California and the Bay Area because of how prone to earthquakes our state is.

The most recent guest speaker I've listened to was Ganesh Datta, who spoke about how to utilize engineering and entrepreneurship to come up with products that can solve problems for specific groups of people. Creating solutions that require both engineering and entrepreneurship, he taught us how to use soft skills, the design process, and how to ask specific questions that would help get investors interested and willing to pitch in for our product. This was useful for me because I was able to use these skills later when doing my entrepreneurship project at the end of the year.

The first field trip I went on was to the Patriot Jet Team Foundation, where I learned about the importance of accuracy and precision in engineering, more specifically aerospace. When designing and building airplanes, everything must be accurate in order for it to function in the way it was intended. The plane must be perfectly balanced, as all things should be. The same applies to rockets, where the launch angle can’t even be a degree off, or it could completely miss the targeted landing area.

Another field trip I went on was the Santa Clara University and San Jose State University college campus tours, where we visited computer labs and were shown the various research areas and projects being conducted at the schools. I enjoyed seeing the different classrooms and areas where students could learn or study on a college campus. This experience gave me key insight on where I could take my interests in engineering in the future, whether that be taking classes at SCU, or researching at SJSU.

One of the other field trips I went on was the UC Berkeley EECS Day, where I visited Berkeley's campus and learned about their Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program in their College of Engineering. It gave me insight on how much college students were still able to accomplish before graduating and going into any sort of engineering or computer science field. I also learned about Berkeley's extensive alumni network, along with its history of successful graduates including Steve Wozniac and eleven Turing Laureate alumni.

One of the most recent field trips I participated in was actually virtual, where a speaker from Amazon guided us through the details of Amazon Web Services, or AWS. Through this field trip, I expanded my knowledge and growing interest in computer science by learning more about the background processes of such a large online platform. AWS requires thousands upon thousands of lines of code to make it function, and seeing how it provided servers and storage to its millions of users was extremely interesting and eye opening.

During my junior year, I had the great opportunity of being mentored by Anne Mallow, an R&D mechanical engineer working at Sandia National Laboratories. Not only did she provide meaningful insight on all the different fields of engineering as I was trying to narrow down what I was most interested in, she also gave me guidance in preparing my portfolio, resume, brag sheet, college list, and more. I was able to practice my interview skills, receive advice, and overall just navigate my way through 11th grade with her help.