Alex (Mr. Nagy strongly prefers that I call him by his first name, so this is how I will henceforth refer to him) has been at a training yesterday and today, so I have been working with Will Brown, a mechanical technician who constructs various custom parts and does electrical wiring. It would have been difficult to interview Alex, so I decided instead to interview Will, as he was essentially acting as my mentor yesterday and today.
Preface: Will entered college intending to major in electrical engineering, but decided instead to major in art. Upon graduation, however, he found that jobs in art were rather scarce, so when Alex offered him a position, he accepted. I only asked a few questions in my interview, since Will's answers were fairly lengthy and I didn't see that more questions were necessary. Also, I avoided asking simple questions about, for example, what I can expect during my internship, since I'll find that out as I go along. I figured that I can benefit more from listening to his experiences - he has a rather interesting life story - than I could from listening to him explain the various workings of the facility. Finally, please note: the responses I write here are paraphrased. I was unable to record his responses verbatim, so I'm just writing the key points.
Q: What were you doing before you decided to major in art?
A: I decided to transfer to an art degree around the end of my sophomore year. Before that, I was just taking the distribution requirements and some of the classes specific to my major. I kind of lost interest in engineering, so I changed my major and started taking metalsmithing classes. I was immediately hooked. The techniques for metalsmithing are pretty time-honored, and it was really interesting. I was working particularly with copper, aluminum, and brass. I graduated with a Studio Arts degree, which involves physical creation, so I craft things here, but I also paint and things like that.
Q: Why did you choose art?
A: First, let me give some quick background. Before college, I was in the Navy as a nuclear operator. I worked on submarines doing electronics – specifically, power distribution. Even though I was doing electronics, though, everyone has to know a bit of everything on a submarine, so I had some familiarity with air and fluid systems as well. When I went to college, I thought it would be a shame to waste the electronics skills I had learned, so I thought I'd major in electrical engineering. I discovered halfway through that I wasn't too fond of the "engineering" aspect, though. I liked building things, but I didn't like trying to analyze problems and systems. I'd always liked art as a hobby, so I decided to transfer to that. I went to school relatively late, so I decided that I wanted to major in something that I was really interested in.
Q: So, what you do here is pretty similar to what you did in the Navy?
A: I had experience with the functional aspect of design and fabrication from the Navy, but from my art degree, I learned craftsmanship. I'm able to make my projects look professional, which gives me an advantage over a lot of the more technical people. From my experiences in the Navy and at college, I'm able to get function and aesthetics. Most engineers go through school and just learn how to make something functional. That's not to say, of course, that everyone here is terrible at making things neat. Everyone here has to do work, though, and sometimes that includes the physicists as well. Many projects have multiple people working on them. Someone might be responsible for just a couple of wires and have a very good idea of where they go and what they do, so they don't put labels on their work. When there are twelve other people who have to work with those wires, though, you can see where a breakdown occurs. To be fair, we're starting to make rules about that, and the problem is getting better.
Q: Why do you like working at General Atomics?
A: One distinction: I like working at DIII-D. General Atomics is a huge company with a lot of focuses, and DIII-D is just one organization within the company. First, I like what DIII-D does with the research into plasma, clean energy, etc. It's progress in the right direction. It's slow progress, sure, but it's good to see that after such a long time, we haven't given up on fusion, and the work we do here is important to ITER, which is expected to be a big breakthrough. On a more personal level, I like the work I do, with prototyping, building custom parts, etc. My work varies widely, so I never get bored; the wiring you've been helping me with is probably the most repetitive thing I've done in a long time. I get to be a part of daily operations at the company, also. I'm a part of the team, alongside physicists and engineers from all over the world. There's a lot of diversity in the company. If you walk into the control room and ask six people at random where they're from, you'll probably get a different answer from each of them. And the company is full of highly intelligent people, who are able to keep track of everything. I tend to just focus on my particular work. I build things without caring so much about what experimental results the yield. I'm usually constructing things for physicists, who often don't know exactly what they want. They'll ask you for a contraption that does one thing or another, and you go and build something and it isn't quite what they're looking for. You have to learn to ask very specific questions, and it really helps to push the physicists very hard for drawings. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and that's about right. The physicists can describe what they want until they're blue in the face, but I've got my own mental filters, and what I picture may be different from what they intend. Did that answer your question? I don't even remember what the question was at this point… Okay, it did? Great.
So far, I'm impressed by how similar DIII-D is to the robotics team. The entire organization is split up into a large number of smaller groups, each focused on a specific aspect of the reactor - fluid systems, vacuum systems, diagnostics, etc. - just like the robotics subteams. There's a "morning meeting" every day at 8:05 so that the group managers can get together and go over each day's agenda. The key difference between DIII-D and both robotics and school - besides the obvious fact that DIII-D is conducting critical research on the future of clean energy as we know it - is that, from what I've seen, deadlines at DIII-D are fairly relaxed, when they exist at all. DIII-D makes the vast majority of its own deadlines, and the environment is a lot more laid-back than I'm used to. While the rush of robotics is fun for those six weeks out of every year, it's draining; this pace is much more sustainable. I like it, actually. Probably the most unfortunate aspect of the internship is that I'm under 18, so I'm not allowed in the "pit" (area around the reactor) or the "vessel" (the reactor itself), or allowed to use power tools. I still consider my internship to be an amazing opportunity, though, despite being limited by insurance concerns. And, of course, there's the daily commute from Poway to Sorrento Valley. Fortunately, I'm able to work from 7:00 to 4:00 instead of 8:00 to 5:00, so I'm able to beat traffic, at least slightly. All of this is minor, though. So far, I love working at DIII-D, and I hope to keep doing cool things going forwards.
Preface: Will entered college intending to major in electrical engineering, but decided instead to major in art. Upon graduation, however, he found that jobs in art were rather scarce, so when Alex offered him a position, he accepted. I only asked a few questions in my interview, since Will's answers were fairly lengthy and I didn't see that more questions were necessary. Also, I avoided asking simple questions about, for example, what I can expect during my internship, since I'll find that out as I go along. I figured that I can benefit more from listening to his experiences - he has a rather interesting life story - than I could from listening to him explain the various workings of the facility. Finally, please note: the responses I write here are paraphrased. I was unable to record his responses verbatim, so I'm just writing the key points.
Q: What were you doing before you decided to major in art?
A: I decided to transfer to an art degree around the end of my sophomore year. Before that, I was just taking the distribution requirements and some of the classes specific to my major. I kind of lost interest in engineering, so I changed my major and started taking metalsmithing classes. I was immediately hooked. The techniques for metalsmithing are pretty time-honored, and it was really interesting. I was working particularly with copper, aluminum, and brass. I graduated with a Studio Arts degree, which involves physical creation, so I craft things here, but I also paint and things like that.
Q: Why did you choose art?
A: First, let me give some quick background. Before college, I was in the Navy as a nuclear operator. I worked on submarines doing electronics – specifically, power distribution. Even though I was doing electronics, though, everyone has to know a bit of everything on a submarine, so I had some familiarity with air and fluid systems as well. When I went to college, I thought it would be a shame to waste the electronics skills I had learned, so I thought I'd major in electrical engineering. I discovered halfway through that I wasn't too fond of the "engineering" aspect, though. I liked building things, but I didn't like trying to analyze problems and systems. I'd always liked art as a hobby, so I decided to transfer to that. I went to school relatively late, so I decided that I wanted to major in something that I was really interested in.
Q: So, what you do here is pretty similar to what you did in the Navy?
A: I had experience with the functional aspect of design and fabrication from the Navy, but from my art degree, I learned craftsmanship. I'm able to make my projects look professional, which gives me an advantage over a lot of the more technical people. From my experiences in the Navy and at college, I'm able to get function and aesthetics. Most engineers go through school and just learn how to make something functional. That's not to say, of course, that everyone here is terrible at making things neat. Everyone here has to do work, though, and sometimes that includes the physicists as well. Many projects have multiple people working on them. Someone might be responsible for just a couple of wires and have a very good idea of where they go and what they do, so they don't put labels on their work. When there are twelve other people who have to work with those wires, though, you can see where a breakdown occurs. To be fair, we're starting to make rules about that, and the problem is getting better.
Q: Why do you like working at General Atomics?
A: One distinction: I like working at DIII-D. General Atomics is a huge company with a lot of focuses, and DIII-D is just one organization within the company. First, I like what DIII-D does with the research into plasma, clean energy, etc. It's progress in the right direction. It's slow progress, sure, but it's good to see that after such a long time, we haven't given up on fusion, and the work we do here is important to ITER, which is expected to be a big breakthrough. On a more personal level, I like the work I do, with prototyping, building custom parts, etc. My work varies widely, so I never get bored; the wiring you've been helping me with is probably the most repetitive thing I've done in a long time. I get to be a part of daily operations at the company, also. I'm a part of the team, alongside physicists and engineers from all over the world. There's a lot of diversity in the company. If you walk into the control room and ask six people at random where they're from, you'll probably get a different answer from each of them. And the company is full of highly intelligent people, who are able to keep track of everything. I tend to just focus on my particular work. I build things without caring so much about what experimental results the yield. I'm usually constructing things for physicists, who often don't know exactly what they want. They'll ask you for a contraption that does one thing or another, and you go and build something and it isn't quite what they're looking for. You have to learn to ask very specific questions, and it really helps to push the physicists very hard for drawings. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and that's about right. The physicists can describe what they want until they're blue in the face, but I've got my own mental filters, and what I picture may be different from what they intend. Did that answer your question? I don't even remember what the question was at this point… Okay, it did? Great.
So far, I'm impressed by how similar DIII-D is to the robotics team. The entire organization is split up into a large number of smaller groups, each focused on a specific aspect of the reactor - fluid systems, vacuum systems, diagnostics, etc. - just like the robotics subteams. There's a "morning meeting" every day at 8:05 so that the group managers can get together and go over each day's agenda. The key difference between DIII-D and both robotics and school - besides the obvious fact that DIII-D is conducting critical research on the future of clean energy as we know it - is that, from what I've seen, deadlines at DIII-D are fairly relaxed, when they exist at all. DIII-D makes the vast majority of its own deadlines, and the environment is a lot more laid-back than I'm used to. While the rush of robotics is fun for those six weeks out of every year, it's draining; this pace is much more sustainable. I like it, actually. Probably the most unfortunate aspect of the internship is that I'm under 18, so I'm not allowed in the "pit" (area around the reactor) or the "vessel" (the reactor itself), or allowed to use power tools. I still consider my internship to be an amazing opportunity, though, despite being limited by insurance concerns. And, of course, there's the daily commute from Poway to Sorrento Valley. Fortunately, I'm able to work from 7:00 to 4:00 instead of 8:00 to 5:00, so I'm able to beat traffic, at least slightly. All of this is minor, though. So far, I love working at DIII-D, and I hope to keep doing cool things going forwards.