What's your day job?

[MarcD79]

So with all the day jobs out there listed as having an extensive education, I'll now post mine; On-the-road Service Technician for Sears fixing appliances. High School Diploma.

[Jon K.]

I love the fact that this thread has been resurrected. I am fortunate to have a job that lets me work with FIRST and FIRST teams year round as the manufacturing manager for AndyMark. I love the fact that my passion in high school gave me the opportunities it has, and that I now get to do what I do to support thousands of other students from across the globe achieve their dreams and their own successes. I am often asked why I don't mentor a team, and if I wasn't supporting thousands of build seasons between FIRST® Tech Challenge and FIRST® Robotics Competition, I probably would. But then again, I would have the chance to volunteer as much as I do, and I wouldn't have had the chance to meet as many new friends like I have.

No matter what your dream, or day, job is, keep doing what you love and eventually things will work out in the end.

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by Jon K.

No matter what your dream, or day, job is, keep doing what you love and eventually things will work out in the end.

These are the sort of words that keep me going despite my current lack of employment. Sadly, my day job (aside from nominal employment with a Merchandising company) is looking for a job that uses my degree (BS EET, Purdue '15). It's been rough but I'm confident I'll eventually find something, hopefully something that won't totally wreck my current level of volunteering at events.

I guess what I can say is the job market is just like FIRST, hard but rewarding.

[alicen]

I went a little off the beaten path, despite being involved in FIRST long before heading to college! Though I graduated a few years ago and still volunteer now.

My day job currently is doing Industrial Design work, as well as some ME work on a variety of projects, from Google things I'm not allowed to talk about, to working with startups designing their products.

[AustinSchuh]

This is a fun thread to read.

I'm the vehicle software engineering lead and one of the first employees at a trucking software startup. We write software and control systems to let trucks platoon 20 feet apart. I love bridging the gap between software and mechanical engineering. I tell the students that trucks are just big robots.

[Karibou]

I'm a metallurgical engineer in a steel plant that produces hot-rolled plate material. Our plate goes into an incredible variety of cool things, including bridges, buildings, machinery, ships, and military applications. I work in quality at the rolling mill, and a lot of my job involves looking at plates that don't get produced correctly (not to customer specs, defects in/on the plate, etc), figuring out what happened to make it come out wrong, and coming up with a fix to prevent it from happening again. When I'm not doing that, I work to implement changes throughout the process to improve efficiency. I get to work around cool old machinery, get dirty, and do a lot of problem solving, and every day is something different.

[Mark Holschuh]

I have a BS in Mechanical Engineering from UW-Madison. I have been a Product Engineer for John Deere in Horicon, Wisconsin, for the past eight years. I have design responsibilities for engines and exhaust systems in our lawn and garden tractors, and sometimes help out with the Gators and zero-turn mowers as well. Before that I worked 25 years for Tecumseh Products Company designing engines for lawnmowers and snowthrowers.

Come to think of it, I don't really know anything about robots...

[apalrd]

I have a new job since I last posted.

I'm currently working at Williams International, working on embedded software and electronics design for commercial turbofan engines. Some of the projects I work on are certified as high as Design Assurance Level (DAL) A, the highest standard in FAA certification. In these projects, the software must be formally verified and tests are audited by the FAA.

[Jay H 237]

I work in the plastic injection molding field for a major company. I assemble robots and custom automation to handle the molded parts. The company bought out an injection molding machine (IMM) supplier and they are part of our operation now and with the material handling portion they added years ago complete turn key work cells can be purchased by customers now. We also are the OEM for robots for other companies, are logos aren't put on and thier's are but they are the same underneath, think Chevy - GMC.


The cool thing is I get to see parts, games, products and stuff months or longer before they are advertised. The weird thing is going into a store and seeing something and be like, hey I remember working on the stuff to build that months ago!

[teslalab2]

I work at a circuit board shop doing wave soldering, and circuit board repair.

[BigRickT]

I am an IT - Director of Infrastructure by day... FRC Robotics Mentor for 1259 Paradigm Shift, by night. Sleep is optional

[Legator91]

I am a engineer at GM. I was a seat Validation Engineer. I planned, performed, and documented all of the testing needed to meet federal safety requirements.

I have just moved to the Advanced Vehicle Development group at GM (Component Intergration Design Engineer). My role there is to work between design and engineering. In a nutshell I take the crazy cool designs that the studio comes up with, and turn them into somthing that meets requirments and is manufacturable.

FIRST is definitely the reason I went into engineering. Working with the mentors on 67 (HOT) as a kid really inspired me. I also got lucky enough to get hired by GM, so now I get to mentor my old team.

[BSV]

Meteorologist. I lead a research group that uses remote sensing (mostly weather radar, but also geostationary satellites and other things like lightning detection arrays) to study severe thunderstorms, tornados, hail, and the like to improve warnings of those threats to the public(s). So it's a combination of physics, CS, machine learning, social science, and a grab bag of other things.

Based on what I see from the students that apply for our jobs and work for us, if you are looking at a science career and are really good at coding up your ideas then you will go far. There is a severe lack of computing talent in the sciences.

[Chris is me]

I'm a Manufacturing Engineer at QuEST Global Services, working as an outsourcer for Pratt and Whitney. Currently I provide support and programming help for robotic automated inspection machines, which is a task I was able to get thanks to my FIRST Robotics experience. I also work on manufacturing cost estimation models for a wide variety of engine parts.

FIRST, combined with some college classes, gave me almost all of the manufacturing knowledge I had prior to starting this job, and it was immensely helpful when I was starting out.

[zcohen]

I'm a high school technology and engineering teacher. I teach Project Lead the Way Aerospace Engineering and Introduction to Engineering Design, plus I wrote the curriculum for and teach a class called intro to robotics engineering and technology of flight.
Its not always as cool as the jobs other here have, but I would never change it for anything else. Its far more enjoyable than any other career I've had and I hope I have the energy to do it for quite a few more years.