Describe your job and some of the most important skills you use in your work.

Today, I work in a test engineering group doing machine learning. All Snapdragon devices come through our team to be tested before going out to the customer. I work on data automation to make the job of test engineers faster and easier. I use research skills at the beginning of the project to understand what people need. There’s a lot of prototyping, communicating with people to make sure I’m on the right track, and also getting them to trust what I’m doing. At the end of a project, I run user acceptance testing and create documentation to record what I did and how I did it. In my work I also collaborate with computer scientists and data architects. I’m doing a lot of coding right now, and I learn a lot from this work because that isn’t what I went to school for.

How did you get to where you are today? What was your training or education?

My path into electrical engineering was non-traditional. in high school I didn’t even have a 3.0 GPA, and I essentially just got good enough grades to play football. Being an engineer wasn’t in my thought process at all, but I did like to put in car audio systems for all my friends. After high school I went to community college and got a certification in personal training. Then I learned that with Pell Grants I could actually get money back for going to school. I started studying chemical engineering, but then took a circuits class where I started seeing a lot of the same concepts I remembered reading about when I was installing audio systems. That, and a calculus professor who was just awesome at teaching and made Calculus I seem so easy, is what really sent me on this trajectory and let me know that I could do this. I transferred to Arizona State’s electrical engineering program and specialized in electromagnetics because everyone said it was the hardest. I wanted to do whatever people said was the hardest. While in school, I interned at an engineering firm and waited tables to support my two kids. After graduating I got my master’s degree in device physics while working full time in research & development on devices.

What do you love most about your job?

What I like the most is that I can learn new things all the time. When I get new projects, they build on my old skills, but there’s always something new to learn. That’s where I thrive, constantly learning and doing new things.

What is something you find challenging about your job?

The most challenging thing is also the thing that I love the most, and that’s getting a problem presented to me with a blank slate, and having to come up with a solution that typically hasn’t been developed yet. Trying to get people to adopt new ways of doing things and  automating different tasks  is also a challenge. When people have been doing something the same way for a long time, they sometimes resist change, even if it will make their lives  easier. Staying focused on finishing out the current task  when I have new tasks  that I want to get started on can also be difficult. I get excited by new projects, which motivates me to work hard to finish what I started.

What advice do you have for others thinking about working in engineering?

Never stop learning, even after you are out of school. If you stay curious and are genuinely interested in what you’re doing, then the learning doesn’t seem like work at all. If you’re just doing it because you’re going to make a lot of money, you’re going to have a tough time. There were some hard classes, but they were also fun because I was learning and understanding how all the math was applied to electromagnetics. Another thing that’s really beneficial is to talk to the students around you so you don’t feel like you’re the only one struggling in a difficult subject. Sometimes it’s normal for the whole class to get a C or D on a test. Talking to other people helps you see that you aren’t alone and can keep you focused on working hard.