Bill is a mechanical engineer who works at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. He currently deals in mission insurance, a specified niche where he oversees various projects under construction. Bill states that engineering is a great field as there are so many differing branches including civil, computer, and mechanical engineering, all providing countless opportunities in today’s technology based world. According to Bill, the best way to prepare for engineering is to go to school and get your degree, but to never stop learning as it is the only way to continue to excel.
Transcript
>> I love the job because the organization I work for, if I don't like what I'm doing right now I can find some other niche. I fill the niche in [inaudible] because there was nobody else doing it and they needed a body in there and I was coming off a program that, and I didn't have anything better to do. A lot of people say well why do you [inaudible] it's like well I've never done that before. And so that was a new, new and challenging thing for me. I've learned a lot. You can go in different places within the organization or totally different things. We're the spacecraft engineering department we go cradle to grave on hardware from conception to design to build to flying it. So if I'm not qualified necessarily to go to do like structural analysis now but if I had that desire I could probably start learning how to do that on the side while doing my other work and then move into that niche more and more if I wanted to. We build our hardware there in our facility so if you're not even associated with the program you'll see it on a daily basis. You'll see it progress. You'll see the guys testing it. You know, random vibration or vibration machines shake the payload and that's kind of fun to watch. It's kind of neat. It's kind of a lot of work setting it up and then we have thermal vac chambers where we simulate the space environment and setting that all up and it can be very interesting. Challenges now are, there are organizations that are putting extra requirements on designs that we don't necessarily work to because we're more of an experimental development group where we take more risks. The other issue now is, at least for me, is the way they track money. We spend so much time tracking the money that we spend than we do actually the work. It's an extra burden on, that's directly on engineers now to maintain the budgets. It just takes away from being able do real job.
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