Max Molina

What do you do?

I’m a mechanical engineer in Langenthal, Switzerland. I work as a research and development engineer at an industrial robotics company called Güdel. We make robotics that are usually used in factories, like for loading and unloading machines making parts or for welding. I help define the physics/mechanical engineering equations we use for our calculations, write technical reports and work on ideas to try and make our future robots better. Sometimes, like with most office jobs, that involves repetitive computer based tasks and spreadsheets full of data. Those are the times when I’m really glad I know how to write some code.

How did you get there?

While I was at WHS, I took as many math and science courses as I could fit into my schedule, including computer science courses. After I graduated from WHS, I started studying electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I continued programming stuff as an electrical engineering student. After a while, I realized that I missed all of the demos and mechanical stuff from Physics at WHS. I really like touching the stuff I design, it’s part of how I learn. While electrical engineers do touch circuits sometimes, normally you’re encouraged to keep your hands away from live electrical components. I switched to mechanical engineering and graduated from MIT in 2016.

After I graduated from MIT, I started working at Güdel in Michigan. Güdel is a company based in Switzerland, and I always wanted to live in another country to learn more about the world outside the United States. I asked to be transferred to Switzerland to work at the main offices and they said yes! Now I’m here in Langenthal, helping connect the US branch of our company to our Swiss branch and trying to get better at German.

What advice do you have for current computer science students?

I’m not a software engineer or technician like most of the other computer science students who have written bios, but that doesn’t mean coding isn’t useful for me! Coding isn’t a skill that mechanical engineers traditionally needed to know, but the world is changing fast. There are so many fields you can go into where knowing how to code will give you an edge even if your normal job description doesn’t require you to know how to code. You may not even need to know a specific programming language. Just knowing one or two makes it a lot easier to learn other programming languages because there are a lot of similarities and thinking like a programmer is the most important step. Being able to see a problem and understand that it’s solvable with code can make you a really useful person to have around.

Lots of office jobs require you to use Microsoft Office. If you have to do anything that is repetitive, like compiling a monthly report from information stored in a bunch of different documents, knowing how to write macros in Visual Basic can really pay off. I know, that sounds super boring, but can you imagine how much more boring it is to open each document, copy and paste?

One day at work, I found out that one poor guy had to use a program that stopped being supported ten years ago, and he had to copy rows of data each week from a webpage into the old program to keep his information up to date. I wrote him a script in Python that took care of it in seconds and saved him an hour of boring work every week.

Sometimes I have a ton of data to analyze, I need to do a mathematical operation that a program like Microsoft Excel doesn’t offer, or I want to graph a system of equations in order to visualize it better. There’s a programming language called Matlab that’s great for math-related tasks. One of my required classes in college was a Matlab programming course.

If you work in a workshop or a lab, you can benefit from knowing how to code. Lots of tools like mills, lathes, laser cutters and water jets use a language called G-code to execute instructions and make parts automatically which can save a lot of time. I once had to make the same simple part 50 times on a mill for a test. Being able to write some G-code and press the “Start” button every time I got a new blank set up was a lot easier than doing it all by hand.

For one of my classes, I was on a team that made a laser tag kite toy that would crash when it was shot three times by a laser tag gun. We needed to make a small device that we could mount on a kite that would receive an infrared signal and release the kite string. We used a microcontroller called an Arduino and wrote our own simple code to do that. Arduino uses C/C++ and it’s cheap. It’s totally the sort of thing you could use to make your own projects at home for fun. For more complex projects, Raspberry Pi is a good option. If I needed to do something at work like measure accelerations during a test crash with a low budget, I’d program a simple device using a microcontroller.

If knowing how to code interests you at all, definitely take computer science classes at WHS. Even if you don’t think you want to become a software engineer, you should try it if you're curious. Especially in a science or technology field, it can sometimes be as valuable as a skill like knowing how to drive a car. Maybe you don’t need to drive (or code) every day, but once in a while you may need to handle a lot of groceries (or data) or you might need to get from A to B faster than you could on your own.

Computer science pops up in a ton of different places if you’re looking for it. I even knew a biologist who had to reprogram a pipetting robot in her lab. Because of how much work is done with computers these days, I expect a lot more future jobs will require people who know how to code or understand computer science concepts. Knowing how to code just makes your resume that much more competitive and it can help you stand out in a field where not many people are required to know how to do it.

Contact information:

maxmolina@alum.mit.edu

Posted July 31, 2020