Longitude Sound Bytes
Ep 132: Engineering and Creative Mindset (Listen)

Sarah Sowell
Rice University 
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Adrianne Waddell, Associate, Holland & Knight LLP, Austin (30.2° N, 97.7° W)

Adrianne Waddell is an associate at Holland & Knight LLP living in Austin, Texas. After attending Rice University for a degree in civil engineering and receiving a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin, Ms. Waddell worked in the public sector for the Office of the General Counsel and the Public Utility Commission.

The biggest takeaway from my conversation with Ms. Waddell is that college is a time to explore —fields, majors, classes, and ideas— but this exploration doesn’t end once you graduate. Instead Ms. Waddell models how law school, and a law career, can offer an opportunity to explore fields such as energy, environmental policy, and engineering. During her time at Holland & Knight, Ms. Waddle has been able to simultaneously focus on a law specialty that suites her interests, ideas, and skills and explore different corners of law. The excerpts below from this interview shows us how her law career provided her a unique chance to choose a field and explore new ones long after she completed her undergraduate education.

Highlights from the interview:

I would like this interview to aim for how we can inform college students on diverse career paths. What do you think were some influential factors that led to your current position?

Since I was 8, I wanted to be a lawyer, but my path of getting here was nothing traditional, or a straight path. I didn’t really have any lawyers in my family. I would meet them through school events or programs, but I didn’t really have a sense of what that actually looks like in reality. So, I think that the things that kept me going towards this path were pre-law educational opportunities and programs, or having friends with similar interests.

I studied engineering at Rice University because of a pre-college program at University of Texas that encouraged STEM academics. I liked math and science and I thought I could be a lawyer with any degree; so, I ended up pursuing that. At Rice, I also studied environmental law within my degree with Professor Jim Blackburn and took some sustainability courses. So, I started figuring out how to mesh these fields with law. Fortunately, these educational opportunities and programs, or the groups I was in helped me get to my career, even though I did not get there through a straight career path.

Since engineering is an unusual major for a lawyer, could you elaborate on why you picked that and how does that affect your current role?

I honestly had the idea after attending an engineering intro program where I heard engineers can do whatever they want. I focused on environmental and sustainability studies. At the end of college, I thought about whether I wanted to work or go to graduate school or do something else. Finally, I realized I didn’t want to do a master’s in engineering and decided to go to law school. Looking back, I do wish I worked as an engineer for a year or two [after I graduated from Rice].

When you go to law school, you realize that so many people come from different backgrounds. You also have a lot of people that have worked [in different fields such as] the medical field or accounting. I do wish I had worked in a technical field for a little bit because I think it would have given me a different perspective in law school, but also a different perspective on the working world.

When I was in law school, intellectual property law was a big area. Just because I had the technical background, people pushed that a lot on me. And I did explore it. I ended up realizing I really did like the energy side of things. I ended up working for the Railroad Commission here in Austin, which is the state regulatory agency that regulates the oil and gas industry. And from there, I ended up at the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which regulates the electric and other utilities. That was energy- and sustainability-based work. From there, I was hired to my law firm job. I currently work with electric companies, and I have a basic understanding of what’s going on, because I have an engineering background, which gives me credibility with them that, otherwise, I might not have. I have tried to tie what I knew together and what made sense to me naturally.

How do you think your family, your culture, and your community shaped your career path and your interest?

My family has always been very supportive. I didn’t have any lawyers in my family; so, there wasn’t any technical advice or specifics my family could give me. I did learn a lot on my own. But that’s also why I love to speak [to students] like you. I learned so much as I went, but I also had a really good community around me. There was a program that I was in throughout middle school and even high school, and it’s called “Con mi Madre,” which is a Hispanic mother-daughter program, that the Junior League used to run. They were very big on college prep and readiness. They were often the leaders of other Austin community groups. So, I’ve known those people since I was in elementary or middle school and I still see them to this day. They were also founders of the young Hispanic Professional Association of Austin, whose board I joined two years ago, or the Hispanic Bar Association of Austin. They supported me in law school, and now I sit on their board as well. I think they even sponsored a scholarship I had when I was at Rice. I’ve definitely been supported by the community around me in some way, shape, or form in whatever path I’m on at that moment or helping me get to the next step.

What are some of your projects or accomplishments you’re most proud of?

I would say that within the last couple of years, I’ve been taking on more direct roles in case management or handling hearings and depositions firsthand instead of just being the person behind the curtain. You are either writing the pleadings, or doing the prep for a hearing. I think the biggest thing for me is being someone my clients are comfortable calling directly. I’m fortunate that the department I work with fosters that environment and that my clients can call me up directly and say “I need help with this project,” or “we just had this incident happen and need to start preserving evidence, or we’re probably going to get sued on this.” I’m in my sixth year; so, I’m still an associate, but I’ve built up enough trust from my clients.

What kind of projects do you work on? How would you quickly describe your current work?

Anything and everything. My practice encompasses litigation and transactional and regulatory work, and general advice. One day, I could be working on a regulatory project before the state, the next day I could be working on a breach of contract suit for a company that has nothing to do with electricity. Then the next day, I could be looking at someone’s bylaws or board resolutions to help them with corporate governance. Part of that is that we are a general counsel to a certain group of clients. And there are some days where I’m just the middleman trying to get people connected together so that they can do the work I can’t do.

Lately, I’m learning new things, which is nice, because sometimes you can get caught in a monotony of a certain type of work. Fortunately, one thing I’ve been learning to do, as I get higher in my career and move from being an associate to hopefully a partner, is learning how to generate business and pitch myself for new things. I am approaching those things as a learning opportunity. I am trying to learn how to put myself out there more and advance my career in terms of learning new things and generating new business and opportunities.

Taking initiative is definitely a great skill for a college student, and learning as well. What advice do you have for students interested in law?

Contact lawyers and get to know them. Lead informational interviews. Lawyers love to talk in general. I think this equally applies to college students and I’m always happy that students reach out. Our schedules can get very busy; so, I always tell them to be persistent. Taking the initiative speaks volumes to me, especially when someone takes the initiative to contact me. I really do try to always get back to them and make sure we meet. I also think there’s no better way to learn what [lawyers] are doing and what it actually looks like to be a lawyer, what all your options in law are. You would be amazed at how many people with law degrees and aren’t practicing law. I think all those things are so important to figure out. I’ve thought so many times about what I wanted to do with my career in 15 years or 20 years? Do I want to be at a law firm? Do I want to be practicing law in the typical sense? Or do I want to be working at a corporation at a managerial role or compliance role?  There are so many different options.

When I was working at the state, I thought I would work there for two years and then start looking for jobs in a law firm, but I got called within my first year of practice. My mentor that I’d known for four or five years at that point had just moved to this law firm and said that they were looking to hire. They didn’t give me a job off the spot; I still had to interview for it, but my job was never posted online. It was never formally out there. So, your personal network helps you get jobs within this industry.

I think taking the initiative to meet with lawyers, getting to know people, and asking questions will help you learn the ropes basically. Also, take advantage of any opportunity to do a clerkship or even just a day program.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee. This article only aims to share personal opinions and learnings and does not constitute the interviewee’s current or former employer(s)’ position on any of the topics discussed.

Quint Smits
Tilburg University 
Tilburg, The Netherlands (51.5° N, 5.0° E)

featuring Hakan Bacakoglu, Senior Program Manager, Sikorsky, New York City (40.7° N, 74.0° W)

I had an opportunity to lead a career conversation with Hakan Bacakoglu who is a senior program manager at Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation in New York City. Our exchange has taught me to take more risks and take advantage of the opportunities in college where I can fully focus on studying as those opportunities may not arise again when I have a full time job. Another important takeaway for me was the importance of finding mentors in my field who might later open up some career doors.

Hakan grew up in Turkey where he went to school at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara where he got his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering. Afterwards, he attended the University of Waterloo in Canada towards his postgraduate degree in systems design engineering. Since then, he has worked for the leading aerospace/space companies such as Boeing and Sikorsky.

When I asked him about the conflict-free work environment at the International Space Station, unlike on earth, and how they achieve this, he mentioned that there is a form of common understanding that the priority is building and maintaining the space station with high quality and safety standards. He also highlighted that there is no politics in space; they only focus on the main mission, which is creating a working microgravity environment for research and development to improve life on earth.

As a student in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), I had some questions about the societal impact of AI replacing certain jobs like driving for Uber. In response, Hakan talked about the importance of implementing regulations that would create an adjustment period for people who work in those jobs to give them a chance to properly adapt to the changes, which I found to be a well-thought-out answer.

I feel very fortunate to have had such an insightful interview with this accomplished person, and I certainly will be putting the takeaways from our conversation to good use in my own journey.

Highlights from the interview:

You have done some research at the University of Waterloo in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Can you tell me a little bit about that side?

On the space station, a big deal is given to the vision systems. Because the astronauts are not out there, we have to rely on cameras. There’s a lot of cameras on the space station, especially for robotics operations. If you’re going to manipulate an object in space, the robot or the astronaut staying in the space station need to know where that object is. So, using the machine intelligence computer vision, you calibrate your cameras and manipulate a robot to go and grab the object. I extended that research a bit more [at the University of Waterloo]. Canada is very rich in natural resources. Yet, we Canadians are very conscious about recycling. So as part of that, I did research on a vision system combined with ultrasonic sensors. Imagine a recycling company, and there’s plastics, paper, and glass going on the conveyor belt. My research was to use actual intelligence analysis to identify if that object on the conveyor belt is paper, plastic, or glass or not recyclable, and to grab that object using computer vision at the right speed. It’s a faster, more accurate, and cheaper operation for the recycling industry. Artificial intelligence played into how to classify and categorize this object in terms of what kind of recyclable material that is.

You have worked at the Johnson Space Center for some time. Can you tell me how your day was like there?

Their space station program has international partners: NASA, European Space Agency, Japanese Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, and Russian Space Agency. The Johnson Space Center is an administrative hub, but some technical activities are also conducted there. Our offices were at Boeing; so, we didn’t really spend our entire time at the Johnson Space Center. A couple of days a week, I went there for technical meetings or program meetings, or to train astronauts on the use of robotic systems. The Canadian Space Agency is the manufacturer of the robotic system on the space station, and thus we trained NASA astronauts so that they can use the vision system and the robotic system efficiently. The astronauts train in a big pool inside the Johnson Space Center, called the Natural Buoyancy Lab, where they have a mockup of the ISS to get the feeling of microgravity artificially.

This is almost a philosophical question. There are a lot of conflicts on Earth, and space seems to be an exception. All the countries cooperate on space projects, such as the ISS. What do you think how they keep it cool in space?

When I worked on ISS projects, at my level, we were just focusing on the work. We weren’t focusing on politics. We had a common understanding, a common vision about building the space station with high quality and safety. Everybody’s purpose was that. No politics, no other ambitions. Get the job done so that humanity can have a working microgravity environment for research and development and for improving the quality of life on Earth because a new space discovery and the technology you get to work on for space operation may come back as real, day to day technologies we use in our [daily lives].

Shortly after working on the ISS, you went to Washington State University to get a degree in engineering. Why did you get another degree?

It was a certification program; it wasn’t a full degree. I have a master’s degree from the University of Waterloo. My research at the University of Waterloo taught me how to attack the unknowns. You don’t have an exhibitable model to solve a problem, you have to understand what the problem is, you have to model the problem, you have to find solutions to the problem. So, it’s really broadened my perspective, in terms of how we’re going to identify and solve a problem. It really satisfied my scientific thirst, per se, because I produced a lot of publications after that, in computer vision, pattern analysis, and so forth. As you progress through your career steps, your goals and interests may change a little bit. I realized that I was good at people management, at coordinating, and at sequencing tasks in a logical way. So, I realized that I had better strength in managing projects. I had two options in front of me, an MBA or a masters in engineering management. I chose engineering management. It gave me additional skills of project management, budgeting, and people management. Basically, you redefine your interests, ambitions, and visions for future as you go through your [career] because you’re not static. As humans, our feelings, ambitions, and desires for future change. Since I realized that I was better in managing projects, I wanted to have that second certificate. I still use my skills I learned at school.

Do you think that in some areas like space or health, the money factor should just be turned off so that we can spend all the resources in developing those fields?

I think you should do the opposite because there are many moving parts in human society; sociological developments, technological developments, and cultural developments. So, you have to invest in all of these traits. The amount you spend on each of these skills may fluctuate, but you have to keep your tabs on for every field. Now we have a COVID-19 situation, and since last year, we’ve been working from home. Having internet and the Zoom technology enabled me to conduct my business from home as efficiently as I could do from work. So, you never know how these technologies can turn into a very usable application. We have to do our business, and we have to make sure all parts move at the same time. Maybe not at the same speed, but they have to move [together].

Do you really enjoy your work?

Yes, I’m one of the lucky ones. I have worked for good companies in Canada and in the US, and I went to good schools. I was lucky to be able to do what I wanted to do.

What are some skills you learned in college, or during your time at NASA, or any of your other jobs that you find the most useful? Which ones do you use the most?

The field of aerospace and defense is very complex. The systems are very complex. There is no way for one person to know everything. You have to rely on many other people with specific skill sets. It’s not like you write an iPhone application and observe whether it works or not; in the aerospace business, people’s lives [are on the line]. So, you have to make sure that things that you design work properly and safely. You have to be really structured and systematic. Millions of components go into a complex machine or a vehicle, and you have to do the design, manufacturing, and testing in a really structured way. There are standards that you have to follow. You have to be disciplined every day. As you get to a certain point in your career, when you’re moving up, you got to make sure that you’re empowering your team members, giving them responsibility, giving them a chance to prove themselves. Even if they fail, make sure that they learn from the mistakes so they become better at what they do. Create a vision; everybody has to have a common vision and you have to have their buy in. For example, for ISS, everybody is working together so homogeneously, in harmony. And that’s because everybody wants to make sure that the Space Station is completed, it’s operated safely, and new technology and research development is good for humanity. That is creating a common vision.

There has recently been some discussion in the European Union about the use of AI and a social point system. I believe they’re trying to ban it. What do you think about the use of AI in certain ways?

My contribution to research was done 20–30 years ago; so, I may not be up to speed with what’s going on in the AI area. These technological advancements need to be looked at carefully for their social, cultural, and technological impacts. In the U.S., a lot of people are employed in the AI and automation areas. So, are we really replacing these individuals with artificial intelligence and automation? And if we do so, what are the implications on the society? I think it needs to be balanced. I think that has to be some sort of a global initiative. How are we going to deal with AI? Because technology develops very fast. We as humans are not like that. We go to universities, we get education, and we continue to learn. But we also have our lives, families, and commitments to people around us. So, the development in AI or automation should be carefully orchestrated to make sure that the normal functioning society can catch up with those developments. We do not want to create a crisis in the society by replacing humans with robots. You have to make sure that it’s paced carefully.

In my lectures on AI, they say that technological advances in AI won’t creep up on us. So, it shouldn’t be that almost everyone gets unemployed because of the rise of AI. But, in automatic vehicles, it is the case right now that quite a few Uber drivers are seeing those impacts.

Yes. And what are we doing for those people? What are you giving those people, or how are you empowering them with new skills to make sure that they still stay employed, they still function as normal humans or individuals, adding value to society, who can still take care of their responsibilities, their families, and their loved ones. That’s the job of the governments. Because if you leave this to the free-operating, corporate environment, they will go to the extreme. It’s governments’ job to make sure that things are regulated, the society is protected, and people are given a chance to get properly adjusted.

Can you tell me about what you are doing right now in your job?

I started my career as an instrumentation engineer; I worked on instrumentation systems for flight test aircraft. That was the stage that I progressed through technical fields, and I became a project engineer. Now, I’m a program manager. Program manager is a person who is ultimately responsible for the proper execution of a program on time, given the schedule and budget constraints; that is my day-to-day job. I’m the person responsible for a program. There are multiple projects under that program. Those projects are mostly performed by different function groups in the company such as engineering, operations, quality, and aftermarket. Under our program, we have five P&Ls (profit and loss centers). We assign a program manager to each P&L. I’m one of the program managers for a P&L. The budget is $100 million plus, and it is a 10-year program. We’re halfway through, we have another four or five years to go to finish the program. It is a very complex program. So, I have to make sure that not only the program is executed according to the schedule, but also we stay very close with our customers, because at the end of the day, whatever we develop, whatever we manufacture, we need to make sure it meets the customer needs and requirements. So, I have to manage not only the internal program execution, but also the communication and interface with our customers and suppliers, some of them are international suppliers.

What do you think about people such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos coming into the aerospace scene and taking over with their private companies?

It’s a good thing. It’s always been the case; the government establishes the foundation, like Internet, and then the private companies come in and find new applications, new areas, new fields to apply the new technology. In the past, when we launched space shuttles and other rockets, it was NASA playing a bigger role and taking all the cost, engineering, and integration responsibilities. But the United States government enables private companies to do the work as much as possible. So, this is along that direction. The government thinks if we create an environment where private companies get into the business and compete, it will eventually be the best option for the people because it will give you higher quality products at a cheaper cost to the taxpayer. Having Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos come into the space business is good because hopefully it will create a competition, it will make things more efficient and generate better technology. But they will have to make sure that the safety is fully practiced. These private companies are profit-driven, meaning they want to maximize their profit. But we still have to make sure that as these companies evolve and grow, they follow the standard safety and quality protocols and operate in a safe environment.

Could you give some advice to students interested in the field of aerospace, AI, or budget management?

First of all, do the best you can at school. Learn the subjects well because it’s a special time of your life where you can focus 100% on learning. When you start in the professional field, the schedules are crazy and you may not find the same opportunity again to learn or relearn. So, make sure that you maximize your studies at school, stay close to your professors, do additional research in the summer. Use those opportunities in a company where you work for a few months or for a few weeks, you learn what’s going on in those fields. If you’re doing summer practices, try different fields. Go for an aerospace company one summer, work for a medical company another summer and see which ones you really are interested in. Your targets and goals will always change. And they need to change. If they are not changing, there’s something wrong there. But establish goals. Important thing is to get a mentor. When you start working, look around yourself and then pick individuals and ask for mentorship. Although you’re learning on the job and getting experience, those mentors can also give you additional insight into career door. You got to set your expectations really well. You may not find aerospace and space as dynamic and fast-paced as the computer industry, or artificial intelligence. So, make sure that you’re aligned to that. Decisions take time to make and to get there; so, you have to have all the facts, and then you can move on to the next step. So, don’t expect a fast-paced environment. The environment in software companies is very complicated, you will not know everything. So, just be prepared for that. But it’s very rewarding. You feel like you really add value to the society, you get the satisfaction working in the aerospace field. Again, I cannot comment too much on the AI field. I think it’s the future. And work hard. In the industry, no matter how smart you are, you will not know everything. The knowledge base is huge, and everybody has access to that knowledge base. But to differentiate yourself, have a good education, focus on your studies, be disciplined, and work hard. And don’t be afraid to take risks. Even if you fail, you will learn from your mistake. I’m not saying just take foolish risks. Take calculated risks, show yourself, and learn from your mistakes.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee. This article only aims to share personal opinions and learnings and does not constitute the interviewee’s current or former employer(s)’ position on any of the topics discussed.

Naod Araya
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Lindsey Asbury, Associate, Environmental Engineering, Brown and Caldwell, San Diego (32.7° N, 117.1° W)

First of her family to graduate from college, Lindsey went on to establish a successful career in environmental engineering.

Lindsey Asbury is an environmental engineer at Brown and Caldwell, where her responsibilities include regulatory compliance research and technical report preparation. She graduated from Rice University in 2010 with a BS in civil and environmental engineering. While at Rice, she participated in Engineers Without Borders and Rice Society of Women Engineers. During our interview, I had the great pleasure of discussing what Lindsey’s current career entails and the many factors that led her to this particular field.  

Lindsey grew up in Brownsville, Texas and was the first of her family to pursue higher education. She had an innate drive to work toward a goal that was largely abstract. When she made it to Rice, she experienced an intense culture shock. Under the guidance of mentors, however, she soon learned how to navigate Rice in all its cultural complexities. When it came time to conceptualize her career trajectory, financial practicality was front and center. The goal was an intellectually stimulating yet financially rewarding career. This is a common sentiment shared by many first-generation college students seeking to liberate themselves from the same financial burdens as their parents. Graduating during the Great Recession was further motivation to choose practicality. And the results showed as she “made almost more with [her] first job out of college than [her] mom had made working 20-odd years.”

As an environmental engineer at a national firm, Lindsey works very closely with clients to guide them through the complicated and confusing world of environmental compliance. Initially she only valued the more technical side and avoided management or sales. She has now transitioned into project management, however, which entails the organization and management of the resources that are necessary to complete the full project. Part of the job involves fieldwork, allowing her to “go out and get away from the keyboard.” She explained that refined time management was an important skill for her position that she had to learn on the job.

Climate change is one of the biggest hurdles Lindsey’s industry is facing currently. Her office has an internal group studying the effects climate change might have on water availability since many of their municipal clientele have concerns on the declining flows into wastewater treatment plants in California. Furthermore, since changes in environmental regulation laws have cascading impacts on how their clients must report, environmental engineers will be at the forefront of any coming environmental political overhaul. If you think you may value working in an industry that is seeking to be equipped to face the challenges of infrastructure in a changing climate, then a career in environmental engineering might be for you.

Luckily, young professionals at Lindsey’s firm have the opportunity to be part of a comprehensive near-peer mentoring program. She is a proud mentor, helping guide those who are just starting their career paths. She mentioned some great advice: it is never too early to start mentoring others. You already have a certain wisdom that can really benefit someone; seek them out and share it. This interview with Lindsey provides a unique opportunity for first-generation students like me to see one of the many paths that we can take for ourselves.

Highlights from the interview:

Everyone’s family, community, and life circumstance create an initial role for them in society. What was expected of you growing up, and did you adhere to or stray from that? How that has shaped you into who you are now?

That’s such a good question. I was a first-generation college student, so my mom and my stepfather, my grandmother, none of them went to college. The expectation for me was that [college] wasn’t necessary. But I was pretty stubborn about it. I definitely wanted to go to college, and I wanted to do engineering. Both were just out of left field for my family.

I think that I was really fortunate to be given great mentorship by teachers in my high school, both in the sciences and the humanities. Then, when I got to college, being able to work closely with professors in the civil engineering department meant I was supported enough that I made it through.

Navigating Rice as a first-generation college student was an interesting experience. My family was middle class. We were from Brownsville. We didn’t have a ton of money, and just being put into the stratum where, oh, now I get to go to the opera for free and the symphony for free is just a different world. It also meant I was by myself through financial concerns, figuring out how to do FAFSA, how to apply for grants, loans and all that. 

Having grown up with that background, there are dual responsibilities I feel – the responsibility to give back to my family due to the sacrifices they’ve made, and the responsibility to pay forward the support and opportunity I received as I worked towards my college and career goals.

I’m also first-gen, so it’s something that I’ve thought about a lot. I feel like it’s really hard for first-gens to conceptualize what they want their career path to be, because I think it’s easy to conceptualize academia and academics because it’s really straightforward, but when you don’t have parents who are also white collar, it’s really hard to think about career. How did you navigate the whole career search and things like that?

To be honest, I always feel like I’m still working on that. I felt like as a first-generation college student, my primary concerns were really practical: make sure you get a good career that will provide, that’s intellectually stimulating, [so you do] not have to worry about paying the bills or those type of concerns that maybe second-gen—people whose parents just have that expectation that they just need to go to college, get a great job—don’t have. The first year that I was out of Rice, it was soon after the 2008 recession, so we were still feeling effects of that in terms of salary offers. Even at that point, I still made almost more with my first job out of college than my mom had made working 20 odd years, which is really humbling. But after I did that, I felt like that’s it, I’ve made it, and I didn’t really think immediately about my career path.

It took me a couple years of trying to figure out what are my strengths, what do I want to do, what do I get satisfaction out of. They don’t cover that in college. I get a lot of satisfaction from bringing community and a sense of connection across our company, so I’m part of what’s called a rising professionals group, for people just starting out their career paths. We share information; we talk about our concerns from our perspective.

What do you do when you feel like you’ve made it? Did you envision yourself where you are right now 10 years ago?

I had no idea where I was going to be in 10 years. I thought, okay, I’m going to do some engineering, and after that I’ll do engineering that’s a little bit more difficult. I actually resisted the idea of management and sales because I thought I wanted to be on a purely technical path and  tried not to get anything other than technical assignments. But the truth is, in engineering, there’s a lot of management involved and having that skill is really valuable. And now that I’ve started doing project management, I find that I actually like it.

What are some skills that you’ve had to learn with project management that you didn’t learn in college?

I would say more refined time management. In college, you have your problem set, it has to be done by a certain date, and the due date is very hard. With some of these projects, a client might be amenable to having a due date pushed out, or you might find something that needs to be addressed that wasn’t accounted for. So, you have to bring that up and explain the pluses and minuses. It can be a lot more fluid, where you start a project and as it goes through development, there are more things that come up that change the direction of where you’re headed versus having something that has a very defined end.

You mentioned earlier that you’ve been mentored a lot at Rice, even beyond Rice, and that really helped shape who you’ve become. Do you think you’ve engaged in that mentoring as a young professional, now that you’re 10 years out?

I try to connect with people and share what I have. It’s funny, because at any point in my career, I always feel like, well, I don’t know that much, what wisdom do I have to pass on? But you slowly accrue it and before you realize it, you’re far down the road and you’re like, huh, I guess I did do more than I thought.

What led to your current position? What does your position entail, and what do you do on a daily basis?

A lot of the project work that I do is compliance based. We’re offering services to our clients like transactional services, environmental site assessments in support of real estate transactions. We do stormwater compliance; that is one of my focuses. In California, we have a couple of general permits, the industrial general permit and construction general permit. And those require monitoring, sampling, reporting. We help our clients manage all that because the permit document is very large and complex. If it’s not their main responsibility, they have to do this work in addition to the operations of a plant or factory. That is usually when they’ll call us and say “I need a little bit of guidance.”

Could you give a brief example of the kind of projects?

I would say a typical project is for private sector clients, we will go out to a facility and audit their operations. We do that across various market sectors—retail, mining, or manufacturing. We will go in and create a report of their environmental responsibilities or obligations, saying for this permit, they need to do this.

Would you say a lot of your job involves a lot of fieldwork?

Yes and no. Certain business lines require more fieldwork than others. If you’re on a remediation project, then you have to be out there on the site, conducting confirmation sampling or overseeing the work as the eyes and ears of our client. If you work in compliance, a lot of it is paperwork based, because there’s a lot of forms and reporting that has to happen. It’s a good balance. I feel like I don’t spend every day out of the office, but I don’t spend every day in the office.

What aspects of your company culture make it stand out as a great place to work?

What I really enjoy about my company, and part of the reason why I’ve stayed here instead of moving somewhere else, is that I feel like the company culture is such that I feel like I have a lot of growth potential. It really encourages honesty and interaction. One thing that is somewhat unique about my company is that it’s privately owned, meaning that we have a board of directors, but they don’t have majority stake in our company. Our company stock is divided more or less evenly between all the employees so that no one person could sell the company. It means that they’re really invested in making sure that we feel like our growth trajectory as a company is connected to the work that we do here. If we have a particularly good year, then we get a dividend from our profits and the rest goes into employee professional development, business development, finding ways to make our business more efficient. For example, investments in technology and software, sending people to conferences or getting them training or certifications that would end up getting us more work.

How do environmental regulations shape the industry?

It has a really big impact on it. We do constantly monitor for any changes to environmental regulation. Off the top of my head right now, there are pending changes to the general industrial permit for California stormwater, which will have a lot of cascading impacts on our clients. So that’s one thing that we’re constantly monitoring to be able to tell our clients, “Hey, this is coming. This is going to affect your operations.”

What do you think is the biggest issue facing your industry?

It’s pretty difficult to say, but I feel like probably one that we have very little control over is climate change. It’s a massive concern, and we already are trying to plan for any changes that occur as a result of climate change. We even have several internal groups and projects to identify and share resources on effects climate change has on water availability, quality, drainage system effectiveness and other project components. What happens if I have declining flows in a wastewater treatment plant because the rains, the fluctuations in our climate, are a lot more extreme? In California, we’re having periods of drought followed by periods of extreme rain. Would that cause the operation to be a lot different than if you have more consistent water supply? Those are things that a lot of our clients are trying to anticipate ahead of their effects.

What would you say to anyone that is interested in going into your field?

I would say my biggest advice is to just take more risks once you get to the workplace. Ask for more responsibility. Leadership wants to have people to take on more work, because allowing someone junior to take on more responsibility frees them to do other work. A company should want to progress its engineers down this pipeline of leadership. I felt when I first started, I was still learning the ropes; I thought I have to be 100 percent on this knowledge before I can move onto the next thing. And that’s not necessarily true. You can learn multiple things, take on multiple roles, at the same time. I think trying as many things as you can, broadening your experience when you’re younger and people are willing to teach you new things, is really important. Once you reach mid-level, you have these competencies and expertise that lends people to want to give you more of the same type of work, and it’s harder to break out and explore once you’re mid-level or senior level because it costs more on a project basis. And it’s risky. Since we’re at consulting, we have different projects going on all the time. You might have to change jobs to get that broadening of your horizons that you’re looking for, but there’s really no better time than when you’re at the beginning of your career.

Do you feel like you could do that broadening while you’re still in college?

Yeah, definitely. There are internships and research for getting familiarized with different aspects of your field. If there’s a market that you want to work in, getting familiar with which agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or professional organizations support your interests and initiatives is really important. Get in touch with those people to start your network while you’re still in college.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Yi Luo
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Kristine Davis, Spacesuit Engineer, NASA, Johnson Space Center, Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

Growing up under the starry sky in a small town of Kansas, Kristine built an early connection with NASA and space through a local aerospace museum called the Cosmosphere.

She pursued her goal of becoming a NASA engineer during her time at Kansas State University, where she graduated with a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering in 2015. During college, she was selected to participate in the NASA Pathways Intern Employment Program (IEP). Kristine was able to rotate to different groups at NASA in the program and gradually found out her interest in spacesuit design. She was specifically attracted to the human factor in the spacesuit engineering; she explained to me, “You have to put a human inside of it…so it’s like a squishier part of engineering than just the hard facts and equations and stuff.” After graduation, she started her current position at NASA as a spacesuit designer working on the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) spacesuit.

When I asked her about what keeps her returning to NASA, Kristine laughed and said it’s a combination of many factors. She is really inspired by NASA’s mission and appreciates the opportunity to contribute to the frontlines of human explorations. Working in NASA itself is also very enjoyable, she said. The Johnson Space Center and NASA, in general, have diverse teams and a great culture that “encourage[s] innovation” and “encourage[s] young engineers to get involved in technical projects right away.” Mentors and role models are very accessible and have helped her grow as an engineer.

Spacesuit design could be mysterious for many people. To help me understand what being a spacesuit designer entails, Kristine explained that she thinks of spacesuits as “human-sized spacecraft.” When the astronaut goes out for extravehicular activity (EVA), the spacesuit is the only thing that keeps them alive for an eight-hour spacewalk, so her team needs to provide all the life support for that human, including power, oxygen, CO₂ scrubbing, and toxicity scrubbing, among other things. NASA has different technology readiness levels (TRLs), which means some technologies are more ready to fly than others and have gone through different failure scenarios. Kristine’s group is on higher TRL and becoming a flight program. She specializes in the pressure garment system, the part of the suit that the human is living and working inside. The other part of the spacesuit is the life support system, which is the backpack that keeps the environment livable for the human. Kristine especially enjoys the testing in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, which is “basically a big pool.” By putting weight on the spacesuit, her team made the spacesuit neutrally buoyant in the water and tested how the suit performed in a simulated microgravity environment. She also briefly explained that the collaboration between various experts on the team is a big part of her work.

She then talked about what it means to be a good spacesuit designer. They “try and think through every single failure scenario. And, if this will fail, how could it fail, what would be the consequences, and then how can we prevent that failure.” However, this doesn’t mean they are starting from scratch. When the team starts a new project, the first thing they always do is see what people have done in the past and learn from that to avoid repeating mistakes. Kristine thinks one of the most important things she learned right away as an engineer at NASA is that most ideas have been tried before in a certain way or another. After that, “the next step is to see how the commercial industry can help us.” Since the Apollo program, the commercial industry has really advanced in developing new technology that could contribute to NASA’s projects. After collaboration with the commercial industry, the team starts to do testing and improve based on the feedback. Kristine finds it very exciting to go through this traditional engineering design cycle.

For students interested in entering the space industry, Kristine first encourages you to go after your dream, whatever it is, and to share with others what your passion is and why it is your passion; this is the type of information people love to hear in job interviews. Starting early is her next piece of advice. Even though her professors in college thought career fairs were only for juniors and seniors, she still applied for 15 internships in her freshman year and got one callback from United Launch Alliance. She explained that “just being in that aerospace industry really gave me such an advantage for whenever I was ready to apply to NASA.” Internships are great because they are for a short time and get your “foot in the door.” There are a lot of companies in the aerospace industry and many support contractors that NASA uses that do the same work that she and her team do every day, so those could be a good start for a career.

A dream planted in childhood inspired Kristine to pursue a career for a lifetime. Her story reflects that persistence and passion can help students achieve their dream jobs. It’s normal to find new passion along the way, but as Kristine said, go after your dream, act early, and take initiative—the dream job is not impossible.

Highlights from the interview:

When did you first envision yourself as a spacesuit designer or engineer?

I didn’t necessarily know I was going to or wanted to work in spacesuits. But I knew I wanted to work for NASA pretty early on. I grew up in a pretty small town in Kansas. And close by, like a 45-minute drive away from my town, was an aerospace museum called the Cosmosphere, Kansas Cosmosphere. And they have a great collection of space artifacts, and they run a lot of camps and activities for little kids. So, I grew up going to the Cosmosphere and learning about what NASA did and about space. And I found it very interesting. I think the benefit of being in a small town in Kansas is every night…whenever you go outside, you get to see all the stars, and it’s very captivating, combined with all the education I was getting from the Cosmosphere about what NASA did.

What I decided is that being an engineer and working for NASA was my goal, when I was middle school age. At the Cosmosphere, they had a space camp fair and with the space camp, you learn all about NASA. You learned what the jobs were that people did, and we also got to take a trip down to Houston. During that trip, I was like, “This is amazing. I can’t believe people get to do this every day.” And so that’s when I decided that I wanted to be an engineer, and I wanted to work for NASA.

I carried that goal through high school and college, and it got me into the internship program. I got into the Pathways intern program [NASA Pathways Intern Employment Program (IEP)], and then once you’re in the Pathways intern program, it gives you a great opportunity here at the Johnson Space Center to rotate to different groups. And so, my first rotation was in flight operations and while I was in that rotation, I had friends that were over in the spacesuit group. And they were talking about how fun their series was and how they really liked how they get to combine all their engineering skills with this human function of the spacesuit. You have to put a human inside of it…so it’s like a squishier part of engineering than just the hard facts and equations and stuff. I thought that sounded really interesting, so I did my first internship in the spacesuit group the spring of 2014, and I loved it. And so, then I did another two internships following that, and then came on full-time early in the spring of 2016. 

I see you keep returning to NASA. Is it the job itself? Or is it the team, working environments, or team dynamic in NASA that keep you coming back?

That’s a great question. It’s kind of both. NASA definitely had a really great culture at Johnson Space Center and in NASA, in general. They definitely encourage innovation; they encourage young engineers to get involved in technical projects right away. And we have a really great team around us. I have a lot of role models and a lot of mentors that are really accessible and also enjoy teaching me how to become a good engineer for NASA. So that’s part of it. Also, I just have always been just so inspired by NASA’s mission. In that, I get the opportunity to really contribute on the frontlines of exploration and human exploration and so that inspires me every day. I’m really thankful that I can have a little piece of that human exploration and a little piece of the missions that are to come. 

I feel that a spacesuit, to my understanding, is still like a type of clothing, yet it also has embedded a very complicated life support and protection system. It’s more like a hybrid of human skin extension and like a code-bot machinery. It’s a very fascinating area. Could you share a past project that you were really excited about or some memorable experiences of the project you work on?

I think that’s a great description. Yeah, spacesuits—when you look at them, we always relate them to clothing because that’s the first thing that we’re all familiar with, we understand protective clothing that you wear. And they are, in a way, partly that. They’re something you put on, but they are first and foremost a life support system. And we like to think of them as human-sized spacecraft, because whenever the person goes out to do an EVA or extravehicular activity, they’re going out to be by themselves in the vacuum of space. And that spacesuit’s the only thing that’s keeping them alive for that eight-hour spacewalk. So we need everything that a spacecraft would need. We need oxygen, we need power, CO2 scrubbing, toxicity scrubbing—we need to provide all that life support for that human for those eight hours when they go out on that spacewalk.

Some really cool projects that I got to be a part of are whenever we really get to be hands-on with the hardware and get to testing. I think it’s a great opportunity to understand how the suit moves and functions and how a person can interact with it. I specialize on the pressure garment system, the PGS part of the suit. It’s the part of the suit that the human is living and working inside. The other really big part of the suit is the portable life support system, or the PLSS, and it’s just the backpack in the suit that’s got everything in there to keep that pressure garment space a happy environment for that human. We do testing in a lot of different environments that we find to be relevant to try and mimic what it’s going to be like either in microgravity or in a lunar gravity situation.

One of my favorite projects I’ve gotten to work on is when we’ve got to NBL testing. NBL’s our Neutral Buoyancy Lab; it’s basically a big pool. And we can make the suit neutrally buoyant in the water column by putting weights on the suit because the suit just in the water itself will want to float. So we put weights on it, similar to when you’re diving and sometimes wear dive belts or weights so you can float in that water column, and work on these huge-scale mockups of the space station. We did testing to understand how our advanced suit architecture well designed for planetary walking works in a microgravity environment. So, if we do use it on the space station, how will we perform. And I got to organize that test series. I did all the paperwork to get us ready in terms of safety to make sure that all the different parties are talking to each other, that our systems are interfacing with their systems, and we can be safe in the test…And then I also designed the test plan and then executed the test and worked with crew members to be able to guide them through tasks to help test out our suits. It was really a cool project that I got to have it really from start to end. And see how well our suit design works in this new environment, and then how the crew gave us feedback to then make a better design for working closer and closer to flight.

Can you talk a little bit about, as a designer and engineer, how you would usually approach a project and take initiative to find problems?

We do try and think through every single failure scenario. And, if this will fail, how could it fail, what would be the consequences, and then how can we prevent that failure. So that’s something that we take really seriously, especially with anything that’s supporting human life. I think with anything with the spacesuits, whenever we’re trying to design a new system.

Right now, for example, we have different technology readiness levels. We call them TRLs. With the technologies, there’s always the group working in the background where they’re working on lower level technology that hopefully one day will get them to flight. And then we also have flight-ready technologies that have gone through all the different failure scenarios, they’re vetted, they’ve been tested and they’re ready to go, ready to fly. Our project right now is on that track to becoming a flight program. So we are higher in that technology readiness level, so a lot of our designs aren’t necessarily starting from scratch because we already know what we want to design. We’re just now getting ready to test it, break it, figure out how it breaks, and then make it better. But not necessarily starting from scratch.

I am involved in one of those lower technology readiness level projects. We’re trying to figure out how to make an augmented reality display for the suit, which is something that we’ve definitely wanted for several years. It’s really exciting working on this emerging technology that you see a lot around us today with augmented reality. When we’re really starting with a brand-new project, the first thing to do is always see what they’ve done in the past. Because there’s a really good chance that if you’re trying to do it, someone else has tried to do it before you, and trying to figure out what did they do, what works, and what didn’t work. And what can we move forward for lessons learned. I think that’s one of the most important things I’ve learned, right away, as an engineer at NASA. Most ideas have been tried before in a certain way or another. It’s great to reach back and learn those lessons from people before you versus repeating the same mistakes.

So that was really one of the first things we did when we started this new project; we tried to learn from the past about what other projects had done. And then the next step is to see how commercial industry can help us. Since really the Apollo program, the commercial industry has really come a long ways in developing new technology, that we can lean a lot onto what the commercial industry’s doing to see if we can incorporate those new technologies or maybe take that technology and just tweak it to our needs. And then once we do that, then we really start to do testing, we see what works, what doesn’t work. And then we go back to that original design and we improve it. And then we test it again, and then we just go through that engineering design cycle. Until we’re ready to have something to take to a program to say, “Hey, would you fund this for flight?” And so, this is also a really exciting process to go through, that traditional engineering design cycle.

Being a woman, how does this identity impact your role as a spacesuit designer?

I do want to start out with I’m really fortunate in this team that I work with and have the role models around me. My branch, the spacesuit industry, NASA in general, and the people that I interact with every day, I have a very diverse team with a lot of female role models that are in positions of power and management, team leads, technical leads. So, there’s a lot of different female role models that I have within my team that I can look up to and get mentorship from. I definitely think it’s important to have a diverse team, because we all bring different perspectives and different ideas to the table.

As far as spacesuit design, our designs are not female or male in the way that we make the spacesuits, simply because our suits are just not conformal. We don’t need to make suits that are just females or males. We do make our suits, however, to different anthropometry ranges. Which tend to sometimes reflect the female or male population. So, our anthropometry range that we’re trying to reach is first percentile female up to 99 percentile male. This database of male to females [anthropometry ranges] were measured by, I think, the Army or the Air Force. And so, we use that database to try to understand how our suit’s going to fit that large population of people. And we’ve done things specifically with the xEMU design to make it more compatible to fitting the lower range of the anthropometry ranges and then make it more flexible to have the modular sizing options, so that way we can really fit the smaller ranges of subjects better. It’s not just your height, but it’s also your chest breadth, and your chest width, and your arm length, and your leg length, and your vertical trunk distance. It’s a lot of different measurements that we take into play whenever we’re trying to design a suit to fit a really large population of people.

Can you talk a little bit about general advice you have for students who might be interested in pursuing a career in NASA or spacesuit design?

The first thing I would have for advice is to go after whatever your dream is. So, if you’re passionate about NASA or about spacesuit design and really want to work in those fields, I think the biggest thing is to go for it and try to pursue as many avenues as you can.

I think the best pieces of advice that I got early on in my college career, was to apply for internships early. When you first start college, you talk to professors and when they talk about the career fair, they’re like, “Oh, it’s for juniors and seniors. You don’t have to worry about that now.” And my brother is actually also a mechanical engineer and he was like, “Oh no, you should start this soon. You should go as a freshman. And even if you don’t get an internship, you at least have the experience talking to potential companies, and you’ll know what they’re looking for the next time around.” And so, my freshman year, I applied for, I think ,15 different internships. They were all in the aerospace industry, some with NASA, some with private companies. And I got, out of the 15 that I applied to, I got one callback from United Launch Alliance. They launched the Atlas and Delta rockets, and I got an internship offer to spend a summer in Florida at Kennedy Space Center in their launch operations. So that was really such a great foot in the door. Because even though I really wanted to end up at NASA, just being in that aerospace industry really gave me such an advantage for whenever I was ready to apply to NASA.

And so, I guess that’s really my two pieces of advice. One, don’t be afraid to go for it and to share with others what your passion is and why that’s your passion. They will love to hear that in interviews. And two, to really start early—as early as you can when you’re applying for internships and opportunities, because even if it’s not exactly where you want to work, that’s the great thing about internships…it was a great way for me to get my foot in the door by taking an internship opportunity with a contractor. And I think there’s a lot of support contractors that NASA uses that do the same work that we do every day. And so that’s the other thing, too, is to look at the support contractors and even if the opportunity doesn’t come with you for NASA, there are a lot of companies now that are doing work in the aerospace industry you can look into. And then maybe your career would then progress to get to NASA.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Sergio Espinoza Torres
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Shaurya Agarwal, Product Manager, Aptiv Autonomous Mobility (formerly nuTonomy), Boston (42.3° N, 71.0° W)

As college students, it is quite difficult to envision ourselves in our careers five to 10 years from now. Thankfully, I was granted the opportunity to interview Shaurya Agarwal, a mechanical engineering Rice alumnus, and learn about his career endeavors. Shaurya Agarwal graduated from Rice in 2014 with a BS in mechanical engineering and now works for Aptiv Autonomous Mobility (formerly nuTonomy) building software to power self-driving cars. Before he worked at nuTonomy, however, he made many career-defining decisions, and my interview with him revealed how one can build a dream career out of trying new things.

In his time as an undergraduate at Rice, Shaurya learned that he wanted to hone the soft skills that engineering did not provide, and he did so by seeking out leadership positions in engineering organizations like Engineers Without Borders (EWB). He also progressively worked toward improving his leadership skills by first becoming a new student representative (NSR) and then a senator in the Rice Student Association. When asked what advice he would give to undergraduates, he recommended that they “join the engineering team that is actually applying engineering and building things, but also do something that is out of your comfort zone and is entirely soft skill related,” because the successful engineers he has met are proficient at engineering and soft skills.

Shaurya continued practicing his soft skills during his work experience, first while interning at ExxonMobil, both within marketing and as a project engineer. The oil and gas industry did not fit his interests at the time, however. He heard about consulting from his friends that interned at consulting firms, and it caught his attention, so he decided to join Bain & Company after graduation. At Bain, he discovered that there were three skills he wanted to improve on during his consulting experience—good teamwork skills, crisp analysis, and good client relationships. He emphasized how hard it was to adjust to Bain’s fast-paced environment, and the need to develop new skills, but also how formative their mentorship program is, saying “it’s the supporting structure that’s like a safety net that catches you.”

Although his experience at Bain was positive, he was seeking to learn more entrepreneurial skills, so he pursued his MBA at MIT; he hoped it would teach him how to build a business and also give him a way to reset his career. During his MBA, he felt that the position of product manager would be a great fit for him due to his interest in product innovation, so he worked for CISCO for a summer, but it was not the right fit for him at that time.

After thinking about what emerging technologies he was most interested in, Shaurya found a career in the autonomous vehicle (AV) industry. Besides its potential success in the tech sector, Shaurya was also amazed by self-driving cars. While he was doing his MBA at MIT, he found his way into the MIT student-run self-driving car team, which he said “is the only reason why I got my foot in the door of the AV industry.” After his experience on the MIT self-driving car team, he made his way into the self-driving industry by contacting alumni through LinkedIn messaging and finally ended up choosing nuTonomy. Regarding his current position, he said, “I ended up choosing this one because it was early in my career in this industry…I’d want the company that offers me the most opportunity for learning, and then later on I can think about what else I want to do,” which says a lot about his mindset and his focus on continual learning. Although he found comfort in the self-driving industry, he is still learning, and he might change his career path again in the future.

Toward the end of our discussion, Shaurya highlighted how hard it is to isolate yourself from other disciplines you might not have studied before. He said, “every product is a mix of mechanical, electrical, and computer science, basically.” According to him, it is quite difficult to work with coworkers from different specializations without having some knowledge of what they are doing, his case being software and electrical engineering, because “no product today is in a silo.”

Shaurya’s path to where he is now is testament of how important it is to not avoid switching lanes and experiencing new things. Going from ExxonMobile to Bain to MIT to nuTonomy, Shaurya found new experiences and a chance to rejuvenate his career by branching out and having a taste of different career paths. He advised aspiring engineers to contact alumni and really try to find out what they do specifically on a day-to-day basis. Of course, it is difficult to know exactly what you want to do; you could not learn about all the possible career paths you could take in our lifetime, let alone experience all of them. However, facing and accepting your current situation and making the choice that most interests you at that instance can, at the very least, expose you to a lot more than you could imagine.

Highlights from the interview:

For freshmen and sophomores in college, it’s sometimes hard to know what to major in, let alone what we’re going into once we leave college. So I want to talk about your path to where you are right now—starting with your background before Rice, why you chose mechanical engineering, your experience at Rice, why you took an interest in Exxon and then went into consulting…basically, a short background of who you are and what you do.

I chose Rice I think because I knew I wanted to do engineering. Honestly, I didn’t have a strong reason for it. Growing up as an Indian, I saw my choices as either being a doctor or an engineer, and I knew I didn’t want to be a doctor. I was good at math, and I chose engineering. I only applied to engineering schools. I remember I felt really unknowledgeable about the different types of engineering. I’m from Alabama, and the education there is…okay; it’s not the best in the country, and I hadn’t been exposed to much more than just the building blocks—physics, chemistry, et cetera. I wasn’t exposed much to different types of engineering, and so when I got to college I had no idea what something like bioengineering was…I think mechanical and electrical are really the only two that I knew what they were.

I chose mechanical engineering because it felt the most familiar. So I started on that path, and the first year was fine. I became an NSR [New Student Representative], and I joined EWB [Engineers Without Borders]. I always tried to do one engineering activity and one just pure leadership activity. Those two positions, especially the NSR, really brought out this new side of me, and something I really liked—the initiatives and just getting things done and being a leader in that standpoint, coming up with improvement ideas and then executing on them. That, I would say, was the central theme throughout my time at Rice. I felt like I was doing a second major in extracurriculars, because I kept increasing my load on that side every year. In sophomore year, I became a senator. Junior year, I became RPC Vice President and project leader for EWB. And then senior year, I became vice president for all of the EWB. Basically, my path through Rice was I realized that I liked the soft skills side a lot more. I liked the problem-solving but in the less structured manner than engineering offered. I liked the social component a lot more, so I liked problem-solving with other people and bringing people together.

Exxon internship was a phenomenal internship. I was super happy with my first real professional experience. In my interviews for Exxon, I remember specifically telling them I was interested in combining engineering with the business side. And so, that internship there, Exxon had this policy that they hired engineers for everything, so they put me in the marketing organization but as an engineer, which is interesting…was just a very different skill set. Through conversations with some mentors, they recommended that I move from downstream to upstream, and so I requested a switch—I got a return offer, but then I requested an internal switch to the production side. I got this position called project engineer, which is very much an engineer who wants to be more of a project manager. Still looks like technical work is being done, but more from an overseeing standpoint, not from that nitty-gritty executing standpoint. I really liked that internship…but I realized I didn’t like the oil industry.

Just happenchance, a couple of my friends who’d been consulting that summer, I heard what they were doing, and how much of a learning experience it was, how fast-paced it was. I didn’t know what I wanted to do after I came out of Exxon…so I went into consulting because of that, purely because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought I could continue to develop my skill side. I realized if I didn’t want to use the very hard skills of engineering, of solving equations, of being in the wheat, that I needed to develop some other piece that I thought was strong. And through all my leadership experiences at Rice, I thought that my soft skills really add something that was of value, and I decided to double down on that. So I interviewed for all the regular consulting firms and decided on Bain, mostly because of the cultural fit…one of the best decisions I’ve made.

Can you describe things that you initially noticed were different between consulting and Exxon?

Yeah, definitely. I remember my first six months at Bain, I really struggled. And part of that was because I had never been in an environment that was just so fast-paced. I mean, the pace of consulting is just blows every industry out of the water, and if you’re not used to it, then you really struggle to keep up with it…You’re in an environment with people either as smart or, more likely, smarter than you and you’re all working together towards the same goal, a well-functioning machine, but it’s a machine in the way that if one nut is loose, then the whole machine doesn’t work very well. You have a lot of pressure to make sure that you’re performing as well as all your other team members. The combination of the pressure and the speed, and, at the same time, the subject matter that I didn’t feel very confident with, was really tough six months.

And I mean the work itself was demonstrably different than in Exxon. At my second internship, my project engineer position with Exxon was a lot more… working with engineers and scheduling and costs and optimization versus consulting was like, I have one problem, and I need to solve this one problem as a team really, really quickly and be very, very crisp on the analysis…You have to juggle these political items between you and the client, and it really was a completely different set of skills. The core soft skills are useful, but…the three pillars I would say that you’re working with are…analytics, relationships between you and the client, and then synthesizing learnings…And so I struggled with that quite a lot in my first six months, and I basically had to change a lot of the way how I worked in that first year to be able to keep up with it. Engineering, I think, teaches you to be very methodical, very thoughtful—plan things out, make sure, check, recheck, double-check—and all of those things applied [to consulting], but you just have to do those at five times the speed.

Given the pace of consulting, how does that affect the culture? How do people behave with each other? How do people deal with their differences?

I think that really depends on the firm. From what I know, at least, different firms have different cultures. I’ll speak mainly for Bain. I think their team structure is very collaborative…When something is due to the company, people take that in stride. They know how to handle that and lend a helping hand. I think the company as a whole has a really good—this is the number one thing—has a really good mentorship structure. You come in, you have a person assigned to you that is currently in charge of your professional development throughout your time at the company, however many years you’re there, and you also have…three mentors that you pick yourself which…continuously check in with you and help your progress along. On top of that, you can also have longer-vision mentors, that you just choose. I would think the mentorship framework been set up really, really good, and that helped me a lot.

What did you do during your MBA?

There were three big reasons that I chose to do my MBA at the time that I did. The first was that…I didn’t have a lot of foundational business skills that I needed. Consulting is good for getting you very deep into topics, but I wouldn’t say it gives you a whole foundation, and so I wanted to build that, and it was the right time to do it.

Two, I wanted to learn how to build a company. It was something that I felt that I was really unequipped to do. If I had a billion dollar idea tomorrow, what would I do on day number one, day number two, day number three? That kind of tangible skill set, I didn’t feel like I had—that’s part of the reason I ended up choosing MIT, they were a good fit about entrepreneurship.

Then three, obviously the most important reason is that business school offers a reset. It is a unique degree where you can go in one end being anything and come out the other end being anything else. You come in as a teacher and exit as a private equity person. And I thought that it was the right time to reset my career.

And so I went in, and…I knew I wanted to go to the tech sector, so…I said I don’t know where in tech, but let me figure out what role I want to be. And so I looked across the different roles somebody would play, what their business manager and background was good for, and product manager really stuck out. It was this intersection of the two disciplines, and I knew coming out of consulting that I wanted to get a little bit closer to the engineer side, closer because that’s where I realized most of what I was excited about was happening….I wanted to try it out with an established company that knew how to do product management, versus a startup that was still trying out a lot of other things, so I chose a big tech company, CISCO. I was a product manager for one of their cybersecurity products, emerging new products within their cybersecurity division. It was a great internship…I learned what all the different paths you could take, but one thing I realized was that I…really did care about which product I wanted to work on, so I had to be passionate about what I was building… I said I need to find a product manager role for a technology that I really like, and after thinking a lot about it, I settled on autonomous vehicles as emerging technology I was really excited about. I thought it had a lot of potential for impact and was at a point in its development that there were a lot of next problems to solve…I joined the self-driving car team at MIT, student run, learned a lot. And obviously now I’m in that industry.

Why did you choose self-driving cars? How did you hear about the industry?

I first looked at two projects, one being an existing technology that I use a lot, something like Google or Facebook would be a good example of that, where I use their products a lot, and I could potentially get involved in that and help to improve that. The second one being emerging technologies that have a lot of potential, but I may not be using right now.

So, I decided that in this stage in my career, I wanted to work on an emerging technology because the problems were a lot harder, and it seemed more interesting to me…I actually sat down, and I made a list of every emerging technology I could think of, everything from genetics to blockchain, to self-driving cars, to augmented reality, and wrote everything down and started going through a process of ranking them. The two main things I used [as criteria to rank this list] were—what do I think is the potential for impacting humanity, and what I think were the chances of success, like of actually going to happen, like it’s actually going to come to fruition. I remember there were some things out there, like brain machine interfaces…probably a lot of impact…I’m not sure if it’s going to happen in my lifetime…

Autonomous vehicles—it was hitting a high point in both those metrics, but honestly what set me off was I was in San Francisco for the summer, because I was with CISCO, and I saw my first self-driving car…and I was like, “That’s amazing.” And I saw that I was just—I wanted to know how that was working, and it just flooded my brain with the questions, questions and excitement, so I pursued that. And so I spent the rest of the summer networking, going mostly MIT alumni in the area that were working on self-driving cars, just starting to get to know them. Honestly, I can’t thank the MIT Driverless team enough. It was very serendipitous, and there were these two students starting the team in my second year, two students from the aerodynamics and astrophysics department at MIT, and I got connected with them, in a roundabout way, and that team is really what got me…understanding what this technology was, and how it was working. That experience is the only reason why I got my foot in the door…It’s a really competitive industry, but I made sure that I had more experience than the average person. I networked my way into alumni contacts or LinkedIn messaging, things like that; they weren’t recruiting because most of them are so small, and so I just muscled my way into interviewing for all of them. Ended up picking the one I’m at right now, which is nuTonomy…ended up choosing that one because the role I was offered was the most significant for learning. I’d want the company that offers me the most opportunity for learning, and then later on I can think about what else I want to do.

In your journey from being a mechanical engineering major at Rice to where you are right now, were you forced to branch out? Or did you keep working on mechanical engineering things, like in different industries, in different areas?

I would say probably the most branching out I did was senior design at Rice, where I designed a PCB…that was probably the most branching out I’ve done. But then now, in my job right now, sure there is…mechanical piece…we’re building cars…but the majority of the company is working on software. Even when I was in CISCO, the product was cybersecurity products, the hardware box, but the majority of the innovation was all software. And so I would say…it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate yourself from the software, and while you don’t have to be a computer science major, in itself, it’s rapidly becoming a case where if you don’t at least understand how software works, how to work with software engineers, the basic premise, there’s a lot of technologies that you won’t be able to interact with…No product today is in a silo. Every product is cross-functional, and I would say senior design is actually an underrated learning experience because it’s the first opportunity I had to work with multiple engineering disciplines in such a close-fashioned manner…if you look at the entire technology industry today, I would say that every product is a mix of mechanical, electrical, and computer science, basically.

And how did you integrate the learning that you needed to contribute in your company into your life?

I think it was a mix….I took some classes I think were specifically geared towards that. And I would say my experience through the self-driving team obviously helped with that…but I think most of it came from personal curiosity. So even when I was in Bain, I was always technophile…when a new product came out, I was really interested in it, I would start chasing down the rabbit hole—how does this work and how does this work and how does this work and what would I improve about it, and doing those exercises that I later on learned were very similar to product manager interviews…that was also an indication that I was down the right path, because these are questions and exercises I did on my own just because I was interested, not for any goal, just because I was interested.

What advice would you give undergraduate engineering students?

I think for engineers in school right now…there’s lots of advice, but I’ll limit it to helping you find the right career path. And I will say, first make sure that you spend enough time with one of the major engineering student [groups] that are actually applying what you’re learning, whether it’s Solar Car, or EWB, or Hyperloop, or anything, you know? It’s really hard to understand what you do with engineering when it’s all theoretical in class. Those teams are the first step into understanding…what does this equation mean, or how do I ever use this really complicated aerodynamics problem…how do I actually do something with this, you know, what are all those engineers out in the world building products doing?

Two…I would say all the successful engineers that I have ever met do a really good job of being both great at engineering but also great at the soft skills. I have met engineer after engineer—what’s a common theme among the really good engineers that I have met, I would say it’s combining both those things, of being able to do the engineering but also things like being able to manage your work, being able to handle really stressful situations, being able to work across teams, those types of things…And so join the engineering team but also do something that is out of your comfort zone that is entirely soft skill related…And, in general, don’t undervalue that aspect of your skill set, you know you have to be good at both.

And I would say the third thing is what you’re doing right now…I wish so badly that I had talked to more professionals while I was at Rice. If joining an engineering student team is the first step in understanding how engineering education applies, I would say the next step is getting past Rice, and exactly what you’re doing right now, very concretely asking people who had your degree, who are in different positions, what they’re doing day to day…whether or not that sounds interesting to you if you have to do it 340 days out of the year…If I were to go back and do this exercise, I would try to get people from—if you look at it from a grid—I would probably look at people from multiple different industries, and then within an industry, a couple of industries I would pick that really interest me, and go multiple different roles. And just try to understand what this degree turns into.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Naod Araya
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Elizabeth Frank, Applied Planetary Scientist, First Mode, Seattle (47.6° N, 122.3° W)

An applied planetary scientist at First Mode, Elizabeth Frank works at the intersection of science and engineering. Now living in Seattle, Washington, Elizabeth graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2009 with a degree in interdisciplinary science. She then went on to complete her PhD in planetary geochemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2014. During our interview, I had the great pleasure of discussing what her current position entails and how Elizabeth followed her interests to make the switch from academia to industry.

Prior to college, Elizabeth had an interest in astrobiology, and while in college, she discovered a deep fascination with geology. Since RPI had no astrobiology major, she used the interdisciplinary science degree to customize her own astrobiology major that included a concentration in geology. During her PhD, she interned at NASA JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and soon developed a fascination with spacecraft missions. Wanting to explore her space exploration ‘itch’ further, Elizabeth decided to do a postdoc at the Carnegie Institution for Science, where she worked on analyzing data from NASA’s MESSENGER mission. Her postdoc experience confirmed her passion for space exploration, but it also finally unearthed the truth that academia was not the path she wished to follow. With no mentor to advise her on how to leave academia successfully, she began the daunting process of deep introspection. Deciding to leave was only part of the journey; she now had to figure out where to go.

From a young age, Elizabeth has been exposed to the intersections—or, as she eloquently describes them, the colliding worlds—of science and engineering, as well as academia and industry. She soon found her career niche at the confluence of these colliding worlds. First Mode is in a rapid state of growth and seeks to play an important role in linking the increasingly commercial space industry with the planetary science community. As an applied planetary scientist, Elizabeth provides technical expertise, project management, and business development on a diverse assortment of projects in space exploration and mining. Her background in the earth sciences has allowed her to tackle projects from a wide breadth of fields. Over time, she has developed a specialized skill set of translating scientific objectives into engineering requirements, asking targeted questions to define exact problems, uncovering the main motivations of clients, and helping unpack biases and assumptions. These soft communication skills set her apart because she can successfully bridge the language and knowledge gap between scientists and engineers, which, in turn, allows her company to provide planetary scientists with the engineering support that they require to conduct their research.

Elizabeth’s nonlinear path serves an important reminder that being bold and true to yourself is not something to fear. Making the transition from academia to industry was undoubtedly stressful, but it led her to an exciting and meaningful career in a burgeoning industry. As someone also interested in the intersection of science and engineering, I found the conversation with Elizabeth to be an affirming and inspiring experience. Her journey reminds me that only I can truly shape my destiny.

For more inspiration and information, check out her amazing blog where she documents her learned experiences in making the leap from academia to industry and in balancing the colliding worlds of science and engineering!

Highlights from the interview:

Can you start by telling me a little about yourself?

Sure. So, from New York originally. Went to college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Upstate New York, where I came in as a biochem, biophysics major. Quickly realized I didn’t find it interesting. I ended up switching over to geology, totally fell in love, and I realized over a course of internships as an undergrad, I could combine my interests in astrobiology and geology with planetary science—specifically planetary geology. So, I went to the University of Colorado at Boulder to study planetary geochemistry, and then I ended up going to JPL, NASA’s jet propulsion lab, for a summer. It really confirmed my interest and fascination in spacecraft admissions.

After I finished my PhD, I ended up going to the Carnegie Institution for Science, where I was a postdoc working on NASA’s MESSENGER mission. MESSENGER was a spacecraft that orbited the planet Mercury for four years, and I was there for the last six months of operations and the year afterwards. I was getting basically, not quite real time, but data downloads from my computer every day from space from this instrument that was pointed at Mercury, trying to study its geochemistry. That was a great experience, and it really confirmed my passion for space exploration.

But I decided that academia wasn’t the right environment for me, so I decided to [pursue] further opportunities. I was fortunate to join Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company, in 2016, initially as a geospatial analyst. That was really awesome because I was able to take a whole lot of information and learn a lot about spacecraft engineering and how that happens—but also from the commercial perspective, which was the contrast to my experience working on a NASA mission, which is funded by NASA and the motivation is purely scientific.

Unfortunately, everybody was laid off about a year and a half ago. I took a break from work for about six months, and then I joined a new company called First Mode that, actually, my former coworkers had started. I’m using my background in planetary science to create opportunities for us to support the space exploration community for scientific purposes and for other purposes as well. I’m also doing technical project management actually outside of space, specific to terrestrial mining. Yeah, so now it’s a very grab-bag of things I do. I work in multiple sectors, so the projects I work on are very diverse and interesting and range between proposals to do NASA-related instrument proposals or to build instruments to solve problems that specific mines are facing in terms of technology development. I’m not doing fundamental research anymore, but I’m using my background to solve practical problems.

I feel like your career path is so unique because as someone who studies geology, I’ve never heard of planetary science in the private sector. I was like “Really? You can actually do planetary science without academia?”

Yeah, it’s something that’s extremely unique. I didn’t know I could do it until I did it. It’s not something that’s talked about within academia. I have my own website, and I have a blog about what it’s like to be in planetary science in industry because it’s such a unique career path, and people don’t understand what I do. If you’d asked me a few years ago—let’s say five years ago today, that was 2014, actually pretty close to today I was defending my PhD—I had no idea that this would be where I ended up five years later. I’m really happy how it’s worked out. So, yeah, it’s definitely been a nonlinear path, but it’s been really fun. I’m definitely happier in the current work setting than I would have been in academia, for sure.

Okay, so to step a little back, everyone’s family, community, and life circumstances create an initial role for them in society. What was expected from you from that initial community? Did you adhere to it, or did you stray from it?

Okay. So, my dad is a civil engineer, and my mom studied biology in college. Eventually, when I was in high school, she went back to school to get her MBA, and now she does project management at an engineering firm. So, I come from a science and engineering family. My parents were very focused on us having a good education, me and my brothers. I came from a very supportive family, where their number one priority was getting us set up for success. I’m very fortunate to have grown up in that kind of environment, where they recognized my interest in science and really helped facilitate that as parents. I’m extremely fortunate in that my parents scraped and scrounged and paid for my college education, so I don’t have any student debt going forward. I know that’s not a privilege everyone has, but I recognize that. I wish everybody had that kind of support structure.

In college, I did a bunch of internships. I had mentors…some good, some bad. One of them was my academic advisor in college. I basically walked to his office, and I told him what I wanted to do, which was create my own major. I was literally the only person in 1200 people who had this major when I graduated. I walked into my advisor’s office and said, “These are the classes I’m going to take,” and he’s like, “Cool. Sounds good.” And he was just very supportive and let me guide my path.

As a PhD student, my advisor expected me to stay in academia, and that didn’t happen. I knew pretty early on, and I communicated pretty early on, that I didn’t want to be a professor, but in planetary science that typically leaves working at a research institution or NASA. And so, I think he expected me to do that. I did a postdoc, which was a great postdoc, and my postdoc was at a place that’s very academic in nature. It’s not at a university, but it’s a research institute. It’s a great environment to be a scientist; it’s adult scientist playground. It’s very supportive, there’s good funding, it’s a great place. But that environment made me realize, even with the best possible circumstances, I wasn’t happy in that working situation. I wanted something that was faster paced, where I saw more tangible work products come out of my efforts. I didn’t really feel that so much in the work I was doing as a scientist doing research.

I had to take it upon myself to figure out how to find an alternative career path, and that involved using my free time. Research what I could do, how to reframe my academic background into something that would be desirable to a company. My postdoc advisor was supportive in the sense that he wasn’t judgmental, but he didn’t know what to do because in academia, most academics stay in academia. They don’t know what to tell people who want to pursue their career paths because they don’t have the first-hand experience. I had to forge my own path in many ways. Part of my motivation for blogging about my experience and being active on Twitter about alternative careers outside of traditional career paths is—you get to define what success means to you. Don’t let anybody drag you down because they think that you’re supposed to follow their interpretation of success. Only you can identify what success means to you. For me, it’s been fulfilled here at a small startup company, which has been really fun, but certainly isn’t something that was on the radar of anyone that would have mentored me over the course of my career.

Have you been using your blog as a way to mentor people who are on a similar wavelength as you?

Yeah, so I basically am using it as a way to capture lessons learned. I’ve both been an interviewee, as someone trying to find a job, and I’ve also had a lot of experience now being an interviewer, as someone who has structured the interview process at her company. And so, I understand the mechanics of how that process works, and what a company like mine looks for in people, and the best ways that someone who is coming from academia can present themselves—because the framework for how we identify as professionals is different in academia versus industry.

In academia, you present yourself as a Mars expert, like for geomorphology, or somebody who studies the atmosphere tightening. It’s your topic. Your identity is wrapped around a particular topic. In industry, your professional identity is determined more by your skills and what value you bring to a company because of previous successes that you’ve had. It’s important to point to things that you’ve achieved and accomplished on behalf of the previous organization that you worked for. It’s the different mentality of how your professional value is judged, and you can see it if you look at a resume versus a CV. A CV is a collection of all the talks you’ve given, all the publications you’ve written, your education, that kind of thing, promoting and describing how you’re an expert in a particular topic. Whereas a resume should be a summary of all of your successes, your wins, and how you’ve provided value in the past to previous organizations, how you bring value to a future organization. Because of your skills. So, it’s a different way of thinking about yourself and what value you bring to a particular community, and that’s why people have trouble making that transition from academia to industry because they don’t get trained on seeing those differences. I’m trying to transmit that information and share that knowledge for people who are where I was, trying to break out of academia. And I’m hoping that it helps people. I have had people reach out to me like, “Thank you so much for doing this,” and “Do you have some time to talk on the phone to help me with this decision?” so I’m happy to help people out because I’ve been there, I get it.

Now I’d like to switch more into your current position and your industry. What does your position entail? What do you do on a daily basis?

In general, I do business development in planetary science, which is a really weird thing to say. But, basically, what that means is that I go to conferences, I reach out to people when I see NASA funding opportunities that could have a good partnership with my company and the scientists, and figure out how we could work together to get a project funded through a proposal.

I’m the only planetary scientist at the company right now, and I work with electrical, mechanical, software, systems engineers. If a planetary scientist needs help with something related to engineering, I have my team of engineers behind me, and I can help make that connection and provide that support that helps them develop tools to do their research. And there’s a level of translation from scientific objectives into engineering requirements, which is actually a specialized skill set that I’ve developed over the years, because engineers are excited to build things. They want to go build. But whenever they build something, any design decision that they make should be routed back to an original scientific objective. On the other hand, scientists don’t always know what they want in order to meet those objectives. They’re not engineers; they don’t really know what they need in order to create a tool. That could be a spacecraft, it could be a laboratory instrument, it could be any number of things. I work in the middle to try and facilitate communication between those. And then there’s an element of proposal management, writing. So, I do go back into literature. I can learn as much as I need to know to get the job done. I get to be more of a generalist, which I like.

And then I do project management, which means I might be the person who’s in charge of executing on a particular project, and that involves running meetings and making sure that we’re meeting deadlines. Communicating with the client so that they know what’s going on. Setting up interviews with people to learn about the background of a project because we do consulting, so typically what it means is that there’s a particular problem that a company or a client is having and we’re being brought on to help solve it.

So, you are like a bridge, an intermediary between the scientists and engineers. Would you say your primary skill set is built upon that and built upon communicating science to people who are not particularly knowledgeable in science and engineering to scientists?

Kind of. I think it’s talking to the scientists. And sometimes scientists go into conversations with engineers, and they think they know what they want with regards to the specifications of a particular tool, but they don’t because they’re not engineers. They don’t actually know what they need to get the job done. I peel that back into “What do you actually want? I know you want a million-pixel resolution. You’re not going to get that. What do you actually need to get sufficient data to answer your scientific question?” Sometimes that involves digging deeper, asking questions, and really getting at the core of what they actually need to solve their problems or achieve their goals.

And that’s not just for scientists, that’s for any client. For example, I’m a technical lead for a project right now in the mining industry. And so, what I’m doing right now for that project is interviews and trying to get at “What’s really your problem?” When people give an answer, it’s following up and just digging deeper into what they’re saying, because sometimes they make assumptions about what they need, but they’re not thinking about why they need it. It’s important to understand motivations. And then on the other flip slide of that is talking to the engineers and being able to break down the scientific objectives and the scientific context in a way that they understand it and that maps to the information that they need in order to design something. Because the thing is, sometimes engineers just want a number. And I’m like, “Well, I have five different estimates, and they span three orders of magnitude, and there’s huge error bars.” So it’s a matter of bridging that gap and documenting assumptions and caveats and being in the center of those conversations and help the person achieve their objectives at the end.

How did you develop this skill? You were trained as an academic, so how did you learn how to talk to engineers and how to understand what they actually want?

On the job. I see now that a lot of the trends in academic projects that I picked involved linking different interdisciplinary sciences together to solve a common project, or solve a common objective, and that required interdisciplinary communication. My major as an undergrad was interdisciplinary science, and so I think there’s a thread throughout my career. I’ve only, within the past few years, realized that that’s where I’m happy sitting. I don’t necessarily want to be the person who’s in the weeds of every single project. I want to be a higher level up and taking the systems-level approach and knowing how this connects to that, who’s talking to that, how information is flowing. Perhaps an interesting way of showing that a scientist can have soft skills, like communication, that can be really valuable outside of academia.

Wow. I’m just really amazed by you because I feel like it’s something I relate to a lot. I’m someone who really values the whole interdisciplinary thing, so I really appreciate that. What you’ve just said really resonated with me.

I’m glad to hear it, and I wish I had people to talk to when I was in your shoes who would tell me it would be okay if I didn’t want to go into academia. I think the problem with the academic community is that you’re often expected to fit into a particular box and follow a particular career path, and the truth is that you’re not. Do what makes you happy, do what gets you excited and makes you so focused and into your work that it’s eight o’clock at night and you had no idea, you didn’t realize you missed dinner, you know. Follow that, and don’t try to follow people’s expectations for you, because you never know what kind of crazy opportunities might come up and how fun they might be.

What are some of the biggest issues or growth opportunities facing your industry right now?

What I’m excited most about is commercial space and what opportunities that could bring to the planetary science community. We’re just at the cusp of thinking about that, especially in the context of small satellites or small sats. Are you familiar with CubeSats?

Yeah, didn’t they take them to Mars recently?

Yeah, totally. Those are the Marco spacecraft. There were two CubeSats that relayed data from the InSight Lander back to Europe, which was a huge step forward for CubeSat technology because it means that we can do meaningful science with small packages for lower cost. I’m really excited about the opportunity to help bridge the gap between the commercial space sector and planetary science, which is very, pretty much exclusively, dependent on NASA. I was in the asteroid mining company, that didn’t really work out because the market just isn’t there yet for asteroid mining, so the planetary science community is dependent on NASA for funding to further space exploration. But there’s increased capabilities in the commercial space market for companies like mine to come in and help build smaller spacecrafts or participate in bigger projects in a way that allows us to show our unique perspective. I’m really excited about the opportunity to see how NASA interacts with the commercial space community to further explore the solar system and keep that ball rolling.

With private space exploration companies coming in, how do you think your company and your objectives might change?

That’s a really good question. Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin and a lot of the other launch providers are trying to lower the cost of access to space. And for planetary science, one of the most expensive costs of the mission is launch. And so, lowering launch costs imparts the reusability of rocket stages that could create more opportunities because it would create more funding to send things out to space, and so that’s one area. For a company like mine, we are offering…we’re a services-based company, we’re doing consulting, so we can come into projects with a fresh perspective and help change how something is being done to do it more efficiently or more creatively. And maybe taking a little bit more tactical risk because NASA traditionally likes to play it safe. And the NewSpace sector is really exciting because people are willing to take risks and fail, but then it’s important to, when you fail, learn from your failure. Elon Musk has been really good at demonstrating when SpaceX fails during launches and then showing how they learn for the next time from them. I think spaceflight is challenging, and there are many ways that things can go wrong. Being bold is not something to be ashamed of if you fail, as long as you can take that failure and move it forward to improve the technology the next time around. So, embrace failure. That’s my lesson learned there.

What advice would you give a student who is interested in going into your career, your field?

Well, it’s hard to say follow my footsteps and you’ll be able to end up how I did. I had to forge my own path, and it’s hard to know with a sample size of one how easy it is to duplicate that path. But, in general, I would keep your mind open to opportunities outside of academia, and don’t let people put you in a box and assume that because you’re going down a particular career path that means you can only do X, Y, or Z. You can do anything you want. And you may have to work for it, you may have to make some sacrifices, may have to really network hard. Networking is incredibly important. It’s hard to overemphasize how important networking is; I got to where I am now in part through my network. Don’t be afraid to reach outside your comfort zone and meet new people and think about how to provide value to them so they can provide value to you into the future. An introduction to somebody could change your career trajectory. That’s what happened to me, through Planetary Resources. When I put my application into Planetary, I reached out to a colleague who works at NASA who knew the CEO. He introduced me over email to the CEO of Planetary Resources, which expedited my interview process, and three months later I had a job offer. Network. Go to networking events. Don’t let them put you in a box, and make sure you’re following what you want to do and not what other people want you to do.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Callum Parks
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Marcum Reagan, Mission Director, NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO), Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

Marc Reagan is an aerospace engineer, working mission director, and project manager of NEEMO (NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations), a NASA project using an undersea environment as an analog for human spaceflight. After graduating from Texas A&M University with a BS in aerospace engineering and the University of Colorado with an MS in aerospace engineering sciences, Marc’s NASA career began with responsibility of flight controller training for the International Space Station (ISS). He also worked as a Capcom (spacecraft communicator) in Mission Control. Marc has been working on his current project, NEEMO, since its inception in 2001. In our interview, Marc discussed what led to his position on the NEEMO project, the importance of training, and the future of spaceflight.

Marc’s experiences with the NEEMO project have led to his role as mission director. Marc volunteered to be a backup aquanaut for the first NEEMO mission in 2001, participated as an aquanaut on the NEEMO 2 mission, and has served as surface support, mission lead, and now as the mission director. I was struck by how little we talked about the engineering aspects of Marc’s position; it seems that in an environment where every team member already has extensive technical knowledge, the chief challenge is efficiently working together. As NEEMO’s mission director, Marc stated communication and coordination are the most important aspects of his job. He explained that his undergraduate experiences taught him communication and his experience in NASA taught him coordination. Marc uses this knowledge of communication and coordination to teach skills to future astronauts.

Similar to how Marc learned many of his coordination and leadership skills on the job, astronauts are learning coordination, communication, and leadership through ‘expeditionary training’ programs like NEEMO. Before the NEEMO project, astronauts would train on simulators; after training, they would go home with all mistakes forgiven and forgotten. NEEMO missions, which take place in the extreme subsea environment, carry very real consequences. I never considered the psychological aspects of going to space: staying sane while isolated, being part of a long-term functional team, and the possibility of spending a long time with someone you don’t want to spend a long time with. Having an environment where today’s failures are still broken tomorrow can communicate the weighty nature of being on a space station significantly more than training on a simulator. Astronauts have told Marc that NEEMO ranks as the best preparation for spaceflight they’ve received.

As the NEEMO project prepares astronauts for space exploration, a new commercial space industry is also preparing to send astronauts into space. The emergence of companies such as SpaceX in the private space sector has pressured NASA to change its model of business. Operating on taxpayer money, NASA cannot take the same risks as the private sector. It is a 60-year-old agency with 60 years’ worth of protocols, processes, and safety rules. With Vice President Mike Pence announcing a return to the moon by 2024, however, aggressive deadlines require an aggressive march forward. Marc said that many members of NASA leadership view this as a unique and rare opportunity allowing forward progress. As we look to the future of space exploration, I now understand the importance of Marc’s work; missions couldn’t be crewed if it weren’t for the invaluable type of training Marc directs with NEEMO.

Highlights from the interview:

When did you first see yourself in your mission director role in the NEEMO project, NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations?

The NEEMO project started basically with us saying, “Hey, we’ve got this wild idea of using the subsea environment as an analog and training ground for spaceflight.”

My friend Bill Todd and I both worked in spaceflight training in leadership positions and would conduct simulations during the day with astronauts, to train them. But then they would go home, and any mistakes or long-term consequences were forgiven and forgotten. We were looking for something a little bit more consequential, something a little more real that you didn’t just get to step away from. Something where your actions had consequences; what failed today was still broken tomorrow, that kind of thing.

NEEMO 1 was a feasibility mission for this idea of using subsea as an analog to human spaceflight. Then NEEMO 2 was a mission I was on. I wasn’t the mission director; I was a crewmember for that one. Then we just kept developing it and started making it more and more realistic as a spaceflight analog. So I guess by the time we reached NEEMO mission 3, I started taking the Mission Director role, and Bill started doing more of the logistics coordination with people that own the Aquarius habitat. I kind of just grew into the position because that’s where my expertise lay. I also worked as a Capcom in the control center for the International Space Station, and so that experience is what helped me take more of the mission director leadership role, being more involved in real time flight ops.

What are the skills you find yourself utilizing the most?

Communication and coordination. It always comes down to that. Any leadership role, and certainly this is true of an execution field operation like we run, is all about getting the members of your team to do their part: know where they need to be, when they need to be there, what they need to do, and pulling all of that together. And so it’s coordinating a lot amongst a lot of different people—many of whom are not even at Johnson Space Center. We’ve got international partners as well. So coordinating and communicating clearly amongst all of those partners is a skill that is almost all day, every day.

How much technical work do you do?

That’s a good question. I’m not sure how you tease our work apart, because what we’re doing is very technical. It’s all based on technical work. A NEEMO timeline is full of activities that are either testing out tools or ops concepts for spaceflight; we’re testing out experiments that are preparing to go to the space station, as flight experiments. So the technical is laced throughout everything I do or, at least, most of what I do. I’ve got budgetary responsibilities and stuff like that, but I would guess that there’s a technical overtone to 80 percent of the work I do. Eighty percent of it is in service of technical objectives and requires a technical background to fully understand what it’s all about.

In regards to the communication and coordination, how do you feel like your undergraduate and other college time helped you prepare for that?

I think college certainly helps prepare you to communicate. In my case, I had some professors that were very good at preparing us to communicate in written form. Concisely, clearly—so I definitely, came out of my undergraduate experience a much better communicator, and certainly in a written form, than I was going in. And I came out with a very strong technical baseline, which is the enabler for understanding everything we do at NASA. I think the coordination and the leadership skills were more developed on the job at NASA. We have a good pipeline for training people and giving successively more responsibility and opportunity to demonstrate leadership skills.

In regards to college, what should students do to prepare themselves for a position like yours?

Let’s say 50 percent of the position we’re talking about (mine) came from standard preparation. Learning the physics, learning the mechanics, learning how things work so I could be successful as a Space Shuttle Systems Instructor and then as a Space Station Training Lead and as a Space Station Capcom. All of those are things that just standard school stuff prepared me for.

But 50 percent of what I’m doing now came from being opportunistic along the way, too. It was following a pull that I had to go do things that were interesting to me and recognizing opportunities that were possible because I had managers that were open to these kinds of crazy ideas, like taking astronauts to live under the sea and making spaceflight analogs under the sea. The sea is not NASA’s domain, and this is something we had never done before at NASA, so there was quite a bit of institutional inertia getting past the inertia of the idea that, that’s not what we do here at NASA. So we had a rare alignment of leadership that was open to that and people who were willing to support it in the astronaut office. We had a good plan that we executed well and communicated well. And so, skill-wise it wouldn’t be accurate to say, “I’m the guy who had all the skill to be in this place at this time.” I can show you lots of people with similar or greater skills than I have, technically and in communicating and coordinating. I wouldn’t present myself as the guy with the corner on any of this. A big chunk of why I’m doing this is because I was opportunistic along the way, too, and recognized where the opportunities were to try something new and to grow that into something more. And keep it alive all these years. We’re now in our 19th year of NEEMO operations.

What sort of impact do you feel NEEMO project has on the astronauts?

We started this from the perspective of crew training specialists, and the idea was—very simply at first—to present a really good crew training experience. At that time, we were starting to work closely with the Russians on the Shuttle-Mir Program and going into the International Space Station Program. There became some awareness that the Russians do things very differently than we do on a number of fronts, including crew training. One of those things they did was survival training. There were variations of winter, mountain, desert and sea survival training. For example, they would take a Soyuz capsule crew and put them in the forest in the dead of winter for three days to try to survive, to prepare them for the case where they had to abort, or had to come back suddenly from space and landed in the middle of the Arctic, so that they could survive until help came.

And so in our astronaut office, there became this awareness that we’ve done space shuttle 10-day missions for so long, and we know how to do that, but we don’t have a whole lot of experience doing six-month missions where it just might be more important how you get along with people and how you keep yourself sane for six months than it is how technically excellent you are at some thing astronauts do. Also, we’re flying with people who aren’t Americans, that NASA didn’t select. We don’t have the same insight into their backgrounds. How do we come to trust and work closely together with them? I’m trying to paint the picture that the astronaut office was starting to become independently interested in what they call “expeditionary training.” These training exercises that bring people together that aren’t necessarily friends before, but they’re forced together into some kind of intense training experience where they learn leadership and followership and taking care of one another and getting the mission done. We originally conceived of NEEMO as mostly a crew training opportunity, but it became something more than that, more than just a simulation that had real consequences. It became an intense expeditionary training opportunity for the astronaut office. So that’s the background.

The astronaut office since the very first mission has come back and said, “That’s the best preparation we had for spaceflight. There’s nothing we did that was closer or more valuable for flying in space than those NEEMO missions.” We’ve added other objectives along the way, but as far as crew training and preparing crewmembers for spaceflight goes, I think NEEMO kills it for their objectives. And that also explains why our international partners have started participating regularly as well—the Canadian Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, and the European Space Agency.

Do they all send over astronauts to your facility?

Most of them have astronauts that live and train in Houston all year round. But yes, they all have sent numerous astronauts to participate in NEEMO missions, both as commanders and as rookie crewmembers, along the way.

Do you have an interesting fact or something about the whole flight analog project and NEEMO that most people don’t know but would really take someone off guard?

We have had 57 “aquastronauts” in human history, and 56 of those were created by the NEEMO project. We define an aquastronaut as someone who has both been an aquanaut and who has flown in space as an astronaut. The first one, the one we didn’t create, was Scott Carpenter who took a leave of absence from NASA to join a Navy team as a SEALAB II crewmember.

I’ve seen videos of this big pool, and they have the simulations in there, but I heard you mention the sea earlier. Do these exercises take place in an enclosed facility or in the ocean?

You are referring to what we call the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, and that is a gigantic pool we have here in Houston which is used for zero gravity spacewalk training. So it is extremely high fidelity for that purpose. We’ve got a big chunk of the space station mocked up inside that pool. We put on real spacesuits that are pressurized with real restrictions in reach and visibility and that kind of thing, and we practice doing microgravity spacewalks.

NEEMO happens under the ocean. The crew lives in the Aquarius habitat, which is the only remaining undersea research laboratory in the world today. It’s off the coast of Florida Keys and sits in about 60 feet of water. Our crewmembers live there for the entire duration of their mission, and they go outside to do simulated spacewalks in the ocean. We put on enough weight to make them partially buoyant—to simulate partial gravity environments like the moon. A big chunk of what we’re looking at on NEEMO missions is operations concepts for lunar exploration.

Would you say the most important part is the technical experience gained or more so just the psychological experience gained of being underwater for that duration of time for the astronauts?

The astronaut offices see this as a dress rehearsal for upcoming spaceflight. Not every astronaut gets to do this, but, basically, they try to send people that they plan to assign to be commanders on their next space station mission to be a NEEMO commander. And they assign rookies that will be assigned soon to a space station flight to get a rookie mission experience. So whichever of those two positions you will have as an astronaut, it’s a chance to go into a very stressful, high-intensity mission—experience and practice doing your part.

For a commander, there’s a lot to think about that has nothing to do with performing the mission. You have to think about things like, are we going to have a mission shirt? Are we going to design a mission patch? Are we going to have outreach events to schools or…is it going to include my kid’s school? Because it would sure be nice to do that with my kid’s school if so…So there are lots and lots of things that are considerations for a spaceflight that have nothing to do with your training and your actual execution off the timeline that day that are great experiences that come out of this. And, in addition, you’re assigned with a bunch of people you didn’t choose to be there with. You didn’t get any input on who they are. And whether you previously liked them or not, guess what? You’re going to be living very closely together and sleeping about 2 or 3 feet away from them for 10 days or so. And so you learn to be a functional part of the team in an extreme environment. In fact, you can say it’s something you learn, but it’s also something you practice. You can talk about it until you’re blue in the face, and you can learn about it over and over, but it’s also something you practice doing while being a good citizen during a stressful mission.

And then finally, there’s the mission itself with a timeline. On our spaceflight timelines, you have a red line that’s constantly marching across that timeline, and you’ve got little blocks—associated with your name—of all the activities you need to do today. And that red line is like a demon chasing you all day long, reminding you that you don’t have a moment to rest because there’s just that next thing coming up, and if you start now maybe you can get a little bit ahead on it. Or you’re currently behind on a task, and you better hurry up and try to catch up without making mistakes. So operating in an environment off of a timeline, off of procedures, all day long, day after day, is just something you can’t really practice except in an environment like this. So, to give you context, that’s what you get out of a mission like this that’s different than the training you got in a four-hour simulation in a simulator, followed by going home and picking up your kids from school and forgetting all about it by evening.

What is the team structure inside the Aquarius NEEMO lab, and what is the team structure outside—the supporting team structure?

Good questions. We lease the Aquarius habitat and the operations support from Florida International University. They operate it. So when we do a mission, there are six crewmembers that live inside Aquarius for the duration of the mission and two of them are professional staff members from FIU, professional aquanauts that do this kind of thing for a living. Their job is to keep the habitat running and keep it safe and basically allow everything to be in place to accomplish NASA spaceflight analog objectives.

Then NASA brings four crewmembers, and those crewmembers are some combination of astronauts—occasionally an engineer or a scientist from NASA and occasionally somebody from the outside world, say a researcher from a university that’s participating. So those are the four crewmembers that are part of the spaceflight analog. But all six of them are living together and are a cohesive crew.

Then you have what we call the topside team, which includes the rest of the FIU staff who man a watch desk 24/7 during the mission. Think of this as a small mission control, looking over monitors and making sure everyone’s safe and complying with diving regulations and CO2 levels and all of that kind of stuff inside the habitat. They’re also running boat support for logistics and for topside dive support everyday.

We also have a Mission Control Center we set up on shore that’s running everyday doing the types of things one expects of a NASA MCC. So we have probably another eight FIU staff members on shore running topside, boat, and dive, and watch desk operations throughout a mission, and we have 10 to 30 topside NASA-related folks running MCC, supporting experiments, ops and assisting with dive support ops every day.

So there are about 40 to 50 people total—which fluctuates, depending on what kind of experiments we have going on. So to summarize: there are 40 to 50 people back at the Aquarius Reef Base in Tavernier, comprised of FIU staff, mission managers, MCC operators, experiment Principal Investigators, and support divers to support the six crewmembers under the water for the duration of the mission. Many of us wear multiple hats.

That just sounds like so many people just involved in one project.

Yes, and a lot of them have one experiment, and they are the expert of that experiment, and it’s coming up once on the timeline every day, or maybe it’s coming up today and not again for two more days. So they may come and go as required, supporting their experiment and timeline reviews for upcoming days. So not all of those people are huddled around in a space all day everyday. But we have about that many people onsite at some point during a mission. Some fraction of them live there and are FIU staff, but a good chunk of them come from our different principal investigators with experiments and our core team that’s responsible for executing the missions.

How do you like the culture at NASA and your team?

NASA’s got a great culture. It’s very supportive. It’s very family friendly. There’s a lot of trust in the workers to do what they are tasked with doing without constant looking over the shoulder. Just a lot of work-life balance and flexibility of schedule. But we also have a really interesting mission, and we also have times and positions where, no kidding, you better be there, and you better have [your] game face on. And you better be well-trained, and you better be ready to face the fact that today your performance could have the ultimate consequences. And you need to be ready to do your part to make sure that today goes well. And so for all of those reasons, NASA is a great place to work. I’ve had a great career, and I can’t think of anything I’ve seen that seems like it would have been more rewarding to me.

On my team, on our NEEMO project, take all of that and distill it to a really small group of people (our core execution team) that have a yearly mission with a very well-defined focus. NEEMO is something that a lot of people think is cool and would do anything to be part of, so we can afford to be very selective of the team members that we allow to join our team. So we have a very, very high-performing team that works well together, that’s been together—for the most part—for a number of years, and is very cohesive. We have a very discrete goal, and when a mission is successful, we have something we can walk away and feel good about. So for all of those reasons, it is kind of a microcosm of all the best things about NASA to me.

That sounds like a dream place to work.

It really is a good work environment.

How do you feel like, in the past 19 years, technology has changed the project?

That’s a good question. The Aquarius habitat was built several decades ago, and it was not built for wireless. Thirty wireless devices being connected at once, and high-speed internet connections didn’t even exist in those days. So a lot of modifications to the facility have happened along the way, just to try to allow us to keep up with current technologies, and they’ve done a good job of that. We are able to make a high bandwidth data connection between the shore and the habitat. We are able to design a mission with the kind of data-transferring integrity and quality that we see on the space station today.

What I mean by that is clear voice, clear video, file transfers, all of that kind of stuff we can support to the same quality or better than we see on the Space Station. So what I would say is that we have been able to effortlessly keep up with the kind of technology demands that are capability enablers in human spaceflight right now. But I wouldn’t say that we’ve gone out and set the pace on that, for the most part. Occasionally we have experiments that come along that are pressing the boundaries of technology at the time. Like a few years ago, we were looking at a receiver that could make a solid Bluetooth connection with multiple discrete Bluetooth devices at once and interweave those data streams. That’s something that is not typical of Bluetooth. Bluetooth is usually a point-to-point, device-to-device, kind of solution. So occasionally, we are looking at new technologies and using it as a place to experiment with those in a high-intensity setting. But for the most part, I would say that we’ve just kept abreast of human spaceflight technology.

What do you think the biggest issue facing NASA right now is? Or the entire space industry?

Let me give you two issues. The first one is we have a lot of commercial space activity going on right now. The poster child of that is probably SpaceX, but that’s certainly not the only example. But we have companies led by billionaires that are doing really creative, innovative, and aggressive things in human spaceflight right now. It may be premature to say where all of that goes, and how successful all of that will be, but it’s definitely applying a lot of pressure to NASA’s model of business as we’ve developed it over the last 60 years.

And so I think one challenge that we’re struggling with is, how do we learn to be light on our feet again? How do we learn how to be more creative and innovating and more responsive to the kind of things that these commercial companies are able to do, while not losing sight of the fact that a lot of the processes and approaches that we use, that slow us down, are direct results of the fact that we’ve lost people in human spaceflight before? When people die, we implement more strict safety rules, and we implement more rigorous processes. Over 60 years, we’ve lost a number of crewmembers in the service of duty, and what you can rightly call our bureaucracy, to some degree, is a direct result of trying to learn from those lessons and be more rigorous in taking care of our hardware and our people that the taxpayers entrust us with. But throwing hardware out there, and testing it quickly, and turning it around quickly…that’s fundamentally opposed to more rigorous process-driven approaches. It’s hard to strike that balance. And just globally, that’s one of the challenges NASA has today.

The other one is that a couple of weeks ago the Vice President [Mike Pence] addressed the National Space Council and announced that not only is NASA going back to the moon, but we’re going back to the moon by 2024. Boots on the moon in 2024. And that is a very aggressive schedule based on the readiness of hardware today. And, moreover, that’s a very aggressive schedule based on the budget we see today. So layered on top of this challenge of just learning how to responsibly become more nimble and more agile and more light on our feet like some of our commercial partners appear to be, we suddenly have a very, very demanding challenge to meet laid upon us, and figuring out how to do that with no new budget is, I’m sure, keeping a lot of people up at night.

How is NASA facing these issues?

What I’ve seen from our leadership is very much, “Look, this is an opportunity that doesn’t come along very often. We may not know exactly how we’re going to make this happen, but while we have the support of the administration, and presuming we get equal support from Congress, we would be crazy not to run for the cliff and do everything we can to make this happen.” So it’s being addressed with the kind of seriousness, from the Administrator down, that I think people would expect us to address it with. It’s an enormous challenge, no doubt about it. I wouldn’t want to minimize the challenge, because at the end of the day, you and everyone reading your article expects us to bring those people back safely too. We only say “get people to the moon in five years” but implied is the rest of that, which is even harder—ensuring we get them back safely. We also take that as a personal challenge. And so, we’re doing the best we can to figure out the schedules and the budgets and the technical projects that will enable us to go do that. It’ll be a wonderful thing to watch.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Alper Özöner
University of Groningen
Groningen (53.2° N, 6.5° E)

featuring Adrian Galindo, Avionics Engineer, Blue Origin, Kent (47.3° N, 122.2° W)

Adrian Galindo is a really impressive engineer who grew up in Houston, Texas and later graduated from Rice University with a degree in electrical engineering. He currently works at Blue Origin, one of the few privately-owned space exploration companies in the world. He has many insights about what he does and why he does it; in a way, his career is an extension of his creativity.

My conversation with Adrian was my first time talking to someone who works in the field of space exploration, so I approached it as a very special experience to share my fascination with space with an actual professional in the field. When I asked him what his thoughts were on the spirit of space exploration, he quoted a co-worker: “We’ve got to be able to get off this rock and get onto another rock in the event that a large rock comes and hits this rock.”

Born in Houston, Texas, Adrian had a very clear idea about his passion very early in his childhood years. By the time he was in elementary school, he knew he wanted to pursue engineering; by middle school, he knew it had to be electrical engineering. The path leading to his current career was pretty straightforward. He was part of a gifted and talented program in his middle school, and there he found himself programming LEGO MINDSTORMS kits, a LEGO kit where kids can build their own robots out of LEGO parts and then program them. He started making robots he created “do all sorts of crazy things” and discovered his enthusiasm for building and programming. After that, he found himself building a telephone system with RadioShack electronic kits and realized “there’s no magic here. It all makes sense.”

Adrian has been working at Blue Origin as an avionics engineer for more than five years. Blue Origin is focused on developing the means to propel humanity to a multi-planetary species, which is more than the sole task of engineering rockets and operating them. One of the most interesting aspects of working at Blue Origin for Adrian is the “crazy passionate” people that inspire him. During his first employee meeting, he recalls the striking feeling of understanding how much more he had to learn after seeing that many of his co-workers had experience in the most prestigious organizations, such as NASA and Boeing, for many decades. For Adrian, Blue Origin is the place that he gets to be next to people who are very experienced, remarkably intelligent, and very good at what they do.

Adrian holds the view that experience is of utmost value in his field and a degree alone is not enough. When he interviews job applicants for Blue Origin, he looks for people who will be able to manage their work from the start. Since Adrian is a professional who has spent extensive time practicing and working on engineering projects, he is aware of the value of experience and the problem-solver mentality that comes with it, and he seeks this mentality when he interviews someone. For Adrian, experience can be obtained from any project as long as it requires students to organize themselves and solve the problem at hand. He sees two sides to it: the organizational side, where you need someone who is a self-starter to go organize themselves and get the stuff done, and then the practical side of engineering, where someone understands the nuances of electrical engineering that come from having practiced it.

Adrian is truly passionate about what he does and what it means for the future of humanity. Because it can take a long time to see the results of his work, he likens his anticipation about the projects he works on to throwing a ball to himself, hoping to catch it years later. When I asked about a memorable experience from his career, he was happy to recall a very inspirational moment after the first successful landing of the New Shepard rocket. This specific moment was actually featured in a YouTube video called “What 400 Very Happy Rocket Scientists Look Like” and if you look closely enough, you can see a very delighted Adrian among his cheering co-workers. Like Adrian’s metaphor of throwing a ball to oneself, this is the moment 400 rocket scientists caught the ball they threw to themselves years ago.

As a closing to our interview, I asked Adrian about his relationship with science fiction, and sure enough, he is a member of the generation of people who grew up being inspired by Star Trek and Star Wars. As a science fiction fan myself, I would love to finish with Adrian’s words about the place of science fiction: “I think…the role of science fiction is to start asking bigger questions and also to, perhaps, make things that you never thought possible, possible.”

Highlights from the interview

Was there a moment when you decided to be an electrical engineer?

When I was in middle school, we had this gifted and talented program where they would basically pull you out of class, and you’d go work on something, usually science related. The subject changed every semester. I had the luck of having a fantastic teacher for that, and her husband was an electrical engineer. We did a robotics program in that. Have you seen the Lego Mindstorms? I got hooked into that. I started building them, I started programming them, and I made them do all sorts of crazy things. It just took off from there. I started doing circuit design stuff, because I wanted to learn more about it. About why things weren’t working the way I wanted them to be working. I started designing my own circuits for it. It was just one of those things where I’d go learn some things, and it just went up a bunch of interesting avenues, and I was like, “Oh, this is it. I can’t get enough of this.” And so middle school, for me, was basically something, something, something, math, something, something, something, science, something, something, something, this program. It was mostly this program.

What led you to your current position at Blue Origin?

When I was at Rice, I was in the electrical engineering program. I’d done a couple of internships. I was getting to the point where I started looking for jobs, and I went to interview for Microsoft, National Instruments, all those other places. Another friend of mine at Rice was also an electrical engineer, and he happened to be an intern at Blue Origin. He had the same mentor that I did. It was one of those things where I said, “I guess I’ll go for Texas Instruments or something like that, you know.” And my mentor suggested, “What about Blue Origin?” I was like, how did I not think about this? It hadn’t really even occurred to me. I went and applied, and I came here to interview, and I absolutely loved it. It was an instant “This is a fantastic fit for me.” A long time ago I had known that I wanted to work in space. And at some point, NASA lost a lot of its funding, kind of stopped doing a lot of interesting things for a little bit. And so, then that idea went away for a little bit, but then it popped back up with this opportunity at Blue Origin, and I was like, oh, this is fantastic.

What are the skills you find yourself utilizing the most in your position? How did your college years especially prepare you for it?

I like to think of the college education as giving you the fundamental basics. If you look at engineering versus a medical degree—in a medical degree, they try to front-load a lot of the learning that you have to do before you ever get to go practice medicine, which makes a ton of sense. Because nobody wants a doctor who has no idea what they’re doing and figuring it out while they’re at it, right? Whereas with engineering, they give you the basics, they give you the tools to understand the building blocks behind a lot of these things, and then they’re like, “Okay, go.”

So creating something out of what you learned is actually left to you.  So college education gives you the basics…

It gives you the basics, and it gives you tools for understanding, and mostly it gives you practice doing it. I interview a lot of new graduates, a lot of senior positions, and everything in between. And, honestly, just having an electrical engineering degree alone doesn’t really get you what you need in order to be prepared to work in the electrical engineering field for companies like Blue Origin, or for other companies. When I am looking for someone, I like to be able to have them come in, and I want to be able to throw them the keys. Here’s a problem, work on it for a little while. Ask me some good questions, don’t ask me stupid questions, ask me good questions when you think about them. But for the most part, go figure it out. And so a lot of that mentality and that ability to work through problems comes from having worked on projects before.

Experience.

Whether that’s student projects, you know—solar car, rocketry clubs, things like that, the kinds of things where you have to organize senior design projects and things like that. The kinds of things where you have to organize yourself and then go tackle a problem that basically just started at, hey, we’ve got this problem. And then it’s like, well, you’ve got to figure how to do it.

A lot of it really is the practical problems. There’s the organizational side of it, where you need someone who’s a self-starter to go organize themselves and get the stuff done, but there’s also the practical side of engineering, where you have your basics in electrical engineering that have been practically contextualized in a project already.

Creating your own lab and practice.

There was the design kitchen, which was a senior design workshop, at Rice. They basically made a job for me while I was there. I was spending a lot of time in it before I was in senior design. I was at that lab, just kind of poking around, messing with machines, doing things. And it became a really fun job because what I would do is I would basically go up to senior design teams and ask, “Hey, what kind of problems are you having? What are you looking to make?” And they’re like, “Well, we want to make this kind of thing.” And I’d say okay and go figure out a way to go do that. Take your abstract design and turn it into something you could actually make.

But was that workshop for projects that you were specifically given as assignments? Or people would just go there and be creative?

It was a little bit of people being creative, but it was also for people that had assignments. Those were usually senior design teams. So it was all sorts of experience levels, from really specific electrical engineers who were trying to solve a specific electrical problem all the way to bioengineers who had never built anything before and were like, “I want like a long hollow cylinder.” It’s like, you want a tube? Yes, we could make you a long hollow cylinder—or we could get a tube. It was a ton of fun to just be able start project after project, start from the very top and say, “I’m looking to do this kind of thing,” and break it down and figure out ways that we could make these kinds of things.

It sounds like a pretty nice environment to be able to learn in. When you compare yourself to some of the people that you interview, how would you say that you actually differentiated yourself? Was there any particular experience, maybe next to your college education, that helped you along the way?

It was a lot of things like this job that I was doing at Rice. There were a lot of personal projects that I had done beforehand. It was tearing apart a microcontroller and trying to program it to make my own driver for it. It’s the curiosity that gets you started in one of these things. And you get hooked and you keep diving all the way down. It’s those kinds of people that are usually well accepted at these kinds of engineering levels. Because that’s usually what you have to end up doing, and if you don’t have that sort of natural tendency to be curious about it and find out how it works—and not just the specifics of what you’re working on, but how the whole system fits together…I think that’s something that a lot of people lose sight of, especially in the early years of engineering. The fact that this thing that you’re designing fits into a larger system. That took me a little while to understand, even when I was starting at Blue. I had a lot of really great engineers here to show me how it’s supposed to be done.

What is a brief example of projects you work on? Your title says you’re an avionics engineer but what exactly does it entail?

When I first got to Blue Origin, my very first task was to go design, it was sort of a “let’s go figure out what we’re going to do with you, but in the meantime, go work on this.” So my very first task was to go work on the tunnel harnessing system—the tunnel networking system between the forward and the back of the vehicle that basically allows communications, cameras, et cetera, to talk between the two major electronic centers of the vehicle.

After that I spent the next large chunk of time, the next three years or so, designing the Hardware In the Loop (HIL). Which is basically, I like to call it, the vehicle without the aluminum. Everything in the vehicle except the aluminum.

Do you mean the loop like control mechanisms, and sensors, and the integration of all the sensor systems?

Exactly right. So, basically, we took the flight computers, and we fooled them into thinking that they were getting sensors. So each individual sensor was simulated in an electrically accurate way to make it (the flight computer) believe that it was getting sensor data. Then we took all of its outputs, and we simulated those outputs to see if they were correct, and we took that data and put it into a model of the real world, and then we closed the loop around the entire system—faster than the avionics could tell the difference. So, basically, we could fly a real mission. We could put it under weird stresses and be like, “Okay, if there’s too much wind in this direction today, how long does it take you to recover and pull the fin back in the other direction and re-orient the vehicle?” It was a really cool project to work on. Right after the tunnel harness system that I did, they said, “Okay, Adrian, we need a HIL.” I was like, “Cool. I can totally do a HIL. What’s a HIL?”

What’s a HIL?

It was basically a hundred percent blank slate. We want to go build a HIL, go architect it, design it, buy the parts, design the components, make sure it all fits together. I like to give the analogy—it’s one of those things where you sit down, and you make this giant interacting architecture between all of these components, and all of these PCBs that you’re designing. And you make all these interfaces and everything. You have all these schematic reviews and everything. And at some point, you are throwing a ball to yourself. You throw a football to yourself, and then you run, heads down, for like the next year and half, and then you get to the end zone to catch the ball, and you catch it.

Is that your favorite project that you worked on New Shepherd? 

So far. That’s what I’ve been working on for a good while now. I’ve had a lot of interaction with the escape system electronic motor control folks as well.

I believe there are many engineers from different fields working on this project. Would you be willing to describe the dynamics of the team that you work with, in terms of creating such a big project like New Shepherd?

Generally speaking, the way it works is, we have someone from systems, or from navigation, who will say, “I need to be able to sense the temperature at this spot in the vehicle,” within some absurd accuracy. They usually want like .01 percent or something and need to do it at a 1000 hertz. And I’m like, “Okay, that’s probably not going to happen. Let’s get more realistic expectations.”

A lot of it is people don’t necessarily know about how to measure electronics. The same way that I wouldn’t know anything about how to design a mechanical box or something. So it’s easy for me to make misunderstood requirements if I don’t understand the system fully, if I don’t understand that subsystem well. And a lot of times, it’s the trading back and forth of “Okay, well, I can’t hit that within reasonable time. I can’t be at .01 percent for you. But I can give you two percent. I can give you two percent today. So a lot of it is interacting with people who want data, or need data, or need to move something in order to control the vehicle, and taking those…I like to call “desirements” and turning them into requirements and a fully functioning vehicle. 

That’s a nice way to put it.

People will start off with, “I’d really like to be able to do this kind of thing,” and then it’s a matter of breaking that down, saying what can I get you today…what can I possibly upgrade us to eventually. The vast majority of engineering is not really the design side of things. The vast majority of engineering is understanding the problem, making sure you’ve agreed on how you are going to solve the problem with somebody else. Especially with engineering for space, the vast majority of time doesn’t go into designing things. It goes into understanding the reliability of that system.

What do you think makes Blue Origin stand out as a great place to work for you? Are there any pros or cons to it?

I remember when I first got here, Blue wasn’t hiring a lot of people at the time. The whole company was maybe three hundred people wide or so. It was quite small. But they had a lot of really talented people. They had to wait a couple months to get enough people together to actually have a new employee meeting. I remember sitting in that room with all the new people that had been hired in the past couple of months, and they would go around introducing themselves, and they’d be like, “Hi, I’m so and so. I’ve been working at NASA for thirty years…Hi, I’m so and so. I’ve been working at Boeing for the past twenty-five years.” And it was just person after person after person. You know, “I used to work on a submarine, used to work on a nuclear reactor, used to work on…” and then it’s like, “Hi, I’m Adrian. I have zero years of experience. I’m twenty-two years old.” And it was just one of those enlightening moments where it’s like—I have a lot to learn. And one of those things that Rice really taught me very well is that if you’re the smartest guy in the room, you’re in the wrong room. So one of the things that I do like very much about Blue is that I get to be next to people who have been doing this for so long, and people that are just remarkably intelligent, and very good at what they do, and very passionate about what they do. It’s a great learning—it’s a great place to learn and sort of absorb… just kind of bask and absorb some of the people. You know, one of my coworkers had been working at NASA for the longest time, worked on the Hubble Space Telescope avionics and things like that. It’s just like…you could just sit and listen to some of his stories, and it’s enlightening, it’s also like…this is NASA in the golden days. But there’s just a lot of nuggets of gold that are spread throughout there. It’s great.

Could you extrapolate more on that, on the environment that you mentioned? I want to better understand how not being the smartest man in the room helps you in different ways.

A lot of it is understanding what other people know that you don’t know. It’s like…in talking to this coworker who had been working at NASA for a long time, who is an electrical engineer, there’s a lot of stuff that you can’t do in space vehicles that you can get away with in consumer electronics, or server systems, or things like that. So you come up with an idea, and you run it past him, and he’s like, “Well, no. I probably wouldn’t do that because such and such will likely make the vehicle fall out of the sky…”

What’s the working culture at Blue Origin?

The culture in general is that you get a lot of people that are extremely passionate about space, which is really comforting to see, and you get a lot of people that love to see launches, a lot of people that love to see that—just love to see space progress in any way possible. Whenever anyone has a launch or an engine test, we’ll pull it up on a big screen and go watch it. Our own engine tests are, of course, mostly crowd-pleasers.

Jeff Bezos has pretty brave visions for the future of space exploration. I’m saying brave, but I really believe in those dreams. Do you have any thoughts about the future of space exploration yourself? Are you an optimist?

I think I’m very much an optimist when it comes to space exploration. I think it’s going to be a long, hard road to get there, but it’s one of those things where you have to go make the small steps now, because if you don’t make the small steps now, we’ll never get to the big steps later. And this is all playing our part in making that system possible.

The next thirty years or so, we’ll see some pretty interesting developments in space, especially with the rise of private companies such as Blue Origin or SpaceX or Rocket labs or other companies that are coming up and doing all this really fascinating work in space. I think we’ll see some pretty great developments. Like I said, space is a pretty tough environment. Waiting to destroy your vehicle or kill your people. There’s a lot of work going into making sure that our systems are a hundred percent verifiably safe for people to go ride on, and there’s just a lot of responsibility that comes with that when you’re designing a lot of those systems.

We are lucky to have a lot of private funding from Jeff, and there are customers that come along and say, “We could really use your engine. It’s the perfect thing for us.” Part of it is building the components that enable humanity to get to space, whether that’s through us or someone else.

What advice would you give to a student who is interested in your field? Electrical engineering or space exploration.

I think for a lot of these things, for things like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, these sorts of fields, a lot of it like I was saying earlier—it’s not rocket science. There’s not a lot of it that’s tremendously new or remarkable. It doesn’t require a new science to go understand how to do these things. It’s engineering. There’s a million choices that you have to make, and you have to balance them against what you need and what you want. So learning to do that, learning the basics of electrical engineering, and then going and doing projects and figuring out how to go do that process, and becoming practically efficient in your field is definitely the most useful thing that you can do as an engineering student. Practically become fluent in the field, so that when you do start, it’s easier and easier for someone to throw you the keys, and all the little problems that you have the first time that you try something are just like, “Yep, I know how to do that. Yep, I know how to do that. Okay, let’s go do this. Let’s go focus on the part of this that actually needs attention, which is the how are we going to do this, comma, in space.”

What has been the most memorable experience in your career?

The first time we landed a vehicle. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that day. The first time we landed a vehicle. It was an extremely inspirational moment, and I’ll definitely never forget that. There’s a video of it on YouTube. It’s called “What 400 Very Happy Rocket Scientists Look Like.” And it’s like, “Oh my god, it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing.” You can definitely see on people’s faces where it’s like I…I gave my life, sweat, and tears for this exact moment, and all of the past several years of very late nights to go see this thing work, and it’s doing what I wanted it to be doing.

Do you like science fiction or do you read it?

I love science fiction. I grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars. I started to appreciate Star Trek more, if you have to push me for one. I think a lot of the role of sci fi is for us to be able to be able to imagine a future.

I think the one thing people miss about Star Trek sometimes is that it’s a future in which humanity has discovered basically infinite amounts of energy and everything suddenly becomes solvable. All these problems that we had previously, the life of need goes away. You no longer are in need of anything. I think it’s this beautiful image of where humanity could be if we could get the resources that we want, or get to the places where we want to be. And it suddenly becomes a question of okay, now that you no longer need anything, what do you want to be doing? Do you want to be creating new technologies? Do you want to be exploring space? Do you want to be questioning, you know, what your role in all of this is? It opens up so many questions. I think that’s the role of science fiction is to start asking bigger questions and also to perhaps make things that you never thought possible, possible.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.