What's your day job?

[jmiller48167]

CAD designer of the M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank.
I tell my kids I draw circles and squares, some squares have more circles some circles have more squares.

[AcesJames]

Currently employed as a Human Resources Clerk at the theme park Six Flags New England in Agawam, MA. I don't do anything STEM related, and the job has nothing at all to do with FIRST.

[~Cory~]

Originally Posted by jmiller48167

I tell my kids I draw circles and squares, some squares have more circles some circles have more squares.

This is going into our team handbook as to what CAD team is expected to do

[AlexH]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ5Um...7Rua1K61-K9zc=
I used to fight battlebots for a summer job... until the company closed due to stupidly high overhead. We used to rent them out for birthday parties... and other events. We'd bring 10 bots, and an arena and then run a round robin tourney.


I now have two jobs. I work at a farm and I also am a professional hobart feeder (dishwasher).

Somehow I also manage to be a high school student too...

[BrendanB]

I'm in charge of the Wine Department at a local grocery store. Doesn't sound like much of a job but considering who runs it at other stores in the chain I'm honored I have employers who trust me to do so and I love it!

[MarcD79]

I work for Sears as an on the road service technician. I repair Dishwashers, Ranges, Microwaves, Compactors, & Gas grills.

[Garten Haeska]

When im not at school or on the golf course, i work part time at the local grocery store as a manager

[tim-tim]

Mechanical Engineering student at Virginia Tech, class of '12.

Then off to the Department of Defense where I have Co-Op'ed and Interned for several years, Patuxent River Naval Air Station in MD. There I work on structural modifications to different A/C platforms and installation packages. I have drawn a lot of Inspiration from FIRST robots and vice-versa. I love my job!

[Kyle A]

I have a couple day jobs, for the past 6 years I have worked at Custaloga Town Scout Reservation. It is a boy scout camp,and i pretty much do it all there, mow lawns, clean, life guard, teach, repair things, cook,sing, and more. My main position though is handicraft director, I teach arts and craft merit badges. And more recently I have started Teaching the robotics merit badge.

My other job while i'm not at camp is a shift manger at a local gas station. I know nothing exciting, but it gave me the time to help Mentor the team and go to events.

I just this week got hired at a local machine shop in town, Great Lakes Manufacturing. I was interviewed for a quality control job, and also a machine operator and programmer of an electronic bending machine. When i was interviewed the guy was really interested in FIRST and what I did, even though its been a few years since I've had hands on work on the robot. Needless to say I got the job working with the robot bending machine.
After I start and get trained more I will be able to say a bit more about what I do, but I know if it wasn't for FIRST I wouldn't be where I am at now.

[smclean1969]

I'm a Senior Project Engineer with the Aerospace Corporation and a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force Reserves. As a Lieutenant Colonel, I work at the Joint Space Operations Center which provides space situational awareness and command and control for our country. This Air Force commercial is actually filmed at the operations center and everyone in there is a member of the Air Force.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfAHw1kTpvY

A word of caution--it's not exactly like that. The commercial is as close to reality as R2D2 is to FIRST robotics competition--it would be cool to build an R2D2 for a competition though.

As an engineer for Aerospace Corporation, I'm working to modernize that operations center. Mostly it's a matter of designing and helping the government acquire the primary computer system that tracks the objects in space and provides that integrated command and control.

[linuxboy]

I am a student, however I feel that other students might find this post interesting / helpful.

I am a (paid) intern this summer (and have been for the past three summers) at an IT consulting firm. It is fairly small with < 10 full time employees. We do some programming, quite a bit of File Maker, and general tech support. It isn't exactly engineering, however it is solving problems, and it does have you work with all sorts of problems and issues. The experience has been quite valuable in terms of working with people, and solving problems (as I said), and has been somewhere that Gracious Professionalism certainly is necessary. Clients can be upset (I haven't run into too many of these), and as someone who does a lot of phone support for clients, and occasionally goes to client offices, maintaining a professional and personable attitude is quite important.

That's what I do at the moment.
- Oliver

[David Brinza]

I've worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 30 years.

Currently, I'm the Instrument Engineer, Investigation Scientist and Co-investigator for the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) on the Mars Science Laboratory. MSL is Dave Lavery's really big rover on it's way to Mars (thanks for the ride, Dave)!

In the past, I've worked other missions, including Deep Space One, with an ion engine, and the Magellan mission (radar mapping of Venus).

FIRST students get to experience a project life-cycle in a few months. Our projects can take years of development and operate in space even longer!

[Mark Sheridan]

I am a manufacturing engineering for Microvention. I focus on access products (microcatheters and etc.) used to help treat aneurysms.

I am in the process development group. So I get to help R&D with new products and figure out how to mass produce them. I also work with the FDA submission proving we can consistently build safe products.

[Captaindan]

I work on a charter boat here in Gulfport, Mississippi, I also weld as much as possible for extra cash. I plan on attending Bagley college of engineering in the fall at MS State.

[esquared]

As many others have stated in this thread, your career is what you make of it. Especially when you first start out as a young engineer, aggressively seek work that interests you, and stretch your capabilities. You'll often find in industry there are all levels of effort/interest by your teammates. Promoting yourself as motivated and capable of learning.adapting to a constantly evolving work situation will quickly set you apart from the field.

Fortunately FIRST has provided many opportunities for you to practice those skills, in front of your mentors as well as judges and VPs during competitions

Advice aside, my day job is an electrical engineer for a "major defense contractor". What does this mean? On any given day, I could be:

• Writing C/C++ on an IBM AIX platform to do multi-threaded signal processing (parallel FFTs, IQ data manipulation, filtering, Doppler processing, etc).
• Writing C++ and MATLAB analysis and/or test equipment automation scripts. The fewer times you have click a mouse or push a button on an instrument the better!
• Writing VHDL for a variety of FPGA platforms, including one very similar to the FPGA inside the cRIO
• Hardware design, which for me is typically high-speed mixed signal circuit board designs with FPGAs, A/D and D/A converters, and RF signal chains.
• Mentoring junior engineers or supporting other engineers in specific subject matters such as phase noise, fiber optic interfaces, and RF design.
• Sitting in meetings or filling out reams of paperwork - well, you can't have fun every day...

Surprisingly I still use about 75% of the math and physics I learned in high school and college. Trig and trig identities get used pretty frequently in signal processing, linear algebra on an almost daily basis. Differential equations to some extent, and calculus at least in terms of series approximations to forumulae.