What are your primary job responsibilities?

My primary responsibility as engineering manager in the Seagate Research Group is to create a vision for the materials that need to be discovered to enable future technologies. I spend a lot of time building relationships and collaborations with researchers at universities, national labs, and other companies.

What is a typical work day-in-your-life like?

A mix of collaborative meetings (both with internal colleagues and external collaborators) and time to work through project proposals, paper writing, and independent data analysis.

How did you find your first job?

During my Post-Doc, I applied online to companies in Minnesota. I got 2 interviews at Seagate, and one of the groups offered me a job.

What level of education (Bachelor's, Masters, PhD, etc.) is required to do your job? 

Technically only a Bachelor’s is required, but almost everyone in the Seagate Research Group has a PhD. 

What is your work schedule like? Do you ever work weekends or nights?

Work schedules at Seagate are fairly flexible on the research team. The main thing is that everyone is making progress and coming up with new ideas. Rarely am I required to work weekends or nights in my role, but I will sometimes work on tasks outside of normal work hours because I enjoy the research.

Do you travel for work? If so, in what capacity, and how often?

Seagate supports us traveling to conferences and other workshops. People generally travel as much or as little as they want in the Seagate Research Group. I travel more than most people because I am the Seagate lead on a variety of projects and academic partnerships. In the research group, attending 3 conferences a year is common.

What is your work environment like? Do you work mostly with a team or mostly independently? Do you stand, sit, or move most of the day?

My work is split between collaborative working meetings and individual work in my cube. Our research group mainly does modelling and simulation, so I do not spend much time doing physical experiments. I mainly sit in my cube, but I do have a standing desk.

What do you like most about your job?

Developing a research vision for new technologies needs. 

What are some tools or skills that you can't live without? These can be technologies, soft skills, hardware, or anything else you can think of.

For building collaborations, I could not live without LinkedIn. It is the way I track and maintain all my professional connections. I can connect and share content with my network on LinkedIn, from people I met in undergrad to people I just met yesterday.

What skills, traits, talents do you have that you think make you a good fit for your job?

Innovative mindset and team leadership. 

What's your best productivity trick?

I do not have a productivity trick, but my best advice would be to know yourself. Understanding when you do your best work, what motivates you, what distracts you, and how to create conditions for optimal productivity is critical. 

What's the best career advice you've ever received? What career advice would you give to someone starting out in your field?

Best advice I received: With respect to networking, make sure to build connections before you need something. Ideally, you should seek to provide value to people in your network. Nothing comes across more ingenuous or off-putting than someone who acts interested in you and your work, and then ends the conversation by saying, “By the way, do you have any job openings?”

Best advice I would give: Develop a growth mindset. (if you have not heard about growth mindset, google it) Be willing to push yourself outside your comfort zone and fail. That is the only way to grow and improve. If you already know 100% of your role, then you are not pushing yourself enough. Ultimately, the top people are always seeking roles outside their comfort zone, and nobody really knows what they are doing, from the entry-level engineer to the CEO. (even professors are mostly just winging it!)

How do you build community in your career field? Are you part of any professional organizations?

I make an effort to attend conferences in my field (MRS, ACS, M&M) and actively network with people at the conference. I try to build connections and spend time with people beyond my group, company, or university. I also attend random local or virtual networking events. My goal is to meet at least 1 person worth adding to my network at each event. (At a conference, 1 person per day) It is also important to reach out periodically to current connections to maintain your network.

Do you have a favorite memory from your time at the University of Minnesota?

A group of classmates would reserve the conferences rooms in Kolthoff Hall to do problem sets and labs together. Although in the moment, I probably did not find it enjoyable, I fondly remember working through the concepts together. This summer, I will be the best man at the wedding of one of the study partners, Dylan Walsh.

Specifically, my favorite project was the Senior Design project for a Chemical Engineering class (I was a double major). Dylan and I were teammates, and everyone in the class had to design a chemical plant using HYSYS. There seemed to be two roughly equivalent software packages in HYSYS everyone was using to model the plant. Dylan was convinced that ours was better, but no one in the class could determine if they were different. Every week, each team had to give updates on their project, and we were usually a week ahead of the rest of the class. One late night in Kolthoff, Dylan decided to build the plant with both models and noticed slight differences in the temperatures of the chemical flows. We were puzzled over what could cause this difference in temperature for a while, and then I realized it could be that the other software package did not account for the enthalpy of mixing. We built a mini model and did the calculations, and it was true. Dylan had been right that the software packages were not the same, and half the class had used the wrong model.

We decided to wait to share this result until the final presentation. We decided to dress up and then proceeded to share in clear detail why half the class had built their chemical plant using the wrong model. It felt like a mic drop moment. We ended up winning the award for best senior design project ($45 gift cards to Starbucks). What made this grand reveal even better was that my class directly preceding the Senior Design presentation was racquetball, so I had chosen to give the final presentation wearing the only suit that would work for both classes- my swimming suit!