The Job Forum

0:00:00
Welcome to the Job Forum. My name is Mana Azizoltani and I am a PhD student at the Harrah College of Hospitality here at UNLV. On this show we discuss the journey through college and into the workforce with recent graduates of different disciplines. Welcome to the Job Forum. Alright let's get this party started. So in today's episode I'm happy to have one of my personal best friends Josh Kelly who's here to talk about his experience working in engineering. Do you want to give an instruction?

0:00:30
Hi, everyone. My name is Josh Kelly, and I studied mechanical engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno, and graduated in December of 2021. I'm a plant engineer for Envy Energy. I work at Silver Hawk Power Plant. fix all problems or come up with solutions for all problems that may occur in the plant.

0:00:51
So for those that don't know, Josh actually works in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of desert. So Josh, how exactly did you land this job? Do you want to go talk about that first?

0:01:00
Yeah, so I had an internship there in 2019, in the summer. So the engineer that I was actually interning under in 2019 was moving up to a supervisor position this year. So he gave me a call after I graduated and told me to apply. So that's how I ended up there.

0:01:21
So he wanted you on his team basically is what you're saying.

0:01:24
Yeah, except he left the power plant. He works at a different power plant, so it's all right though.

0:01:28
So how did you convince him that he wanted you on his team?

0:01:32
It's really important after school to maintain contact with people. So during that internship, although it was only three months, during holidays or during other events in the year or during significant events during college, I would message him and tell him what was going on. Did you send him a Christmas card?

0:01:50
I did not send him a Christmas card.

0:01:52
Should have. But yeah, that was really important. So it allowed for an easier transition into that job. Great. Yeah.

0:02:01
So let's back up to University of Nevada, Reno. I mean, you ditched me, you went to college in Reno. I did. I was very sad about it, but so I want to ask you, like, can you talk about your journey through college?

0:02:14
Yeah, it was a, I had a great time in Reno. So I'm from down here, so that was my first time being up there ever. And it took me four and a half years because of a few classes that gave me a little bit of difficulty. But otherwise, it was a lot of fun. We, like, just building with my friends, you know, like, we, or I met a lot of people up there, so we were able to learn how to study together and learn how to just be on our own together. So it was a whole, you know, that side of the experience. But then engineering-wise was a lot of. It was engineering, let's be honest. Yeah, it was rough. But the classes that gave us hard times was when we really sat down and had to grind together.

0:03:02
It was a lot of late nights, a lot of studying and figuring that out. Definitely a lot of collaboration. Yeah. Do you think that, like I know a lot of my friends that are engineers tell me that everything they learn in school they don't actually use in the real world. Is that kind of true?

0:03:18
So I've actually had two jobs since I got out of school. I've worked for Entact, which is an environmental remediation company.

0:03:27
What, like a glorified janitor or something?

0:03:30
They basically clean up dirt in mines and remediate land so the animals can move back in.

0:03:38
Okay, okay, pardon my ignorance.

0:03:39
Yeah, get it right. But, so, I worked there for a month. I had interviewed for both jobs at the same time and then got an offer from Envy Energy a month later. So, it kinda worked out in a way of my favor, but not so much the first company. But, at that first company, it was really not a lot of use of my degree, although it was engineering, but I was doing more, like, it was field engineering, so I was doing surveying and going out and looking at the land and kind of figuring that out, and then ordering equipment to work on different projects and everything. So that's not really a lot of things you learn in school, although you do have the communication side of things. So I do use a lot of the engineering communication class, which was my probably least favorite class, but it came in handy for both jobs because now my job that I have currently, I write a lot of work scopes. I just do a lot of write-ups where people have to approve my writing. So now it always works out that way that your least favorite class happens to be the one that you always do. Right. But otherwise, math-wise... Yeah, I mean the computer is it all for you. Well, and I use it once in a blue moon, depending on what I'm doing. Programming, I do a lot of programming.

0:05:10
Do they teach that in engineering? Yeah.

0:05:12
Oh, they do? We have different programming classes, different...

0:05:15
What language do you use? MATLAB or something like that?

0:05:18
Yeah, we use MATLAB.

0:05:19
Oh, okay. But I don't actually use MATLAB. It's more of a... It's...

0:05:25
Like a MATLAB derivative? I don't know.

0:05:27
No, it's... Okay, it's not programming in that sense of, you know, we're writing code. It's more of writing logic for things. Oh, okay. So... Like automating things basically. Right. So at the power plant, there's a lot of, you know, a lot of moving parts, lots of things that have to come on at certain times and come on at different temperatures, come on at different, um, just when they're supposed to in that process of the system. So for, we just went through a major outage, which caused lots of things to not work afterwards. So we ended up having to, we had lots of little issues, lots of numbers that were off, lots of data that didn't transfer directly over to the new system. So we had to add sheets and take out sheets and add numbers and values and change logic.

0:06:18
Gotcha, okay, understood. So what exactly is your day-to-day life like at the power plant?

0:06:23
For me, we show up, we have our morning meeting, and then I... Can we just, I just

0:06:31
want you to say this online, what time is your morning meeting at? So, I start at 6

0:06:37
AM, and I work an hour from my house, so I leave my, wake up at 4.45-ish, leave at 5, and I work from 6 to 2.30. Typically there are longer days than that and that's just based off of what the need is of the plant that day.

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Okay.

0:06:56
Yeah.

0:06:57
So back to your day to day.

0:06:58
Back to my day to day. It really depends. Some days I have lots to do, some days I don't. Some days there's lots of things breaking and some days there's not.

0:07:07
So what are you like, do you like to fix it?

0:07:10
Yeah, pretty much. It's a lot of, I don't fix anything, I don't touch anything. I'm not allowed to touch anything.

0:07:17
You're not a tech, right?

0:07:18
Right. So, but if something breaks and nobody knows how to fix it or it's not a problem that we've had before, then it becomes a lot of research. It becomes going through manuals and reading through books and looking at data for different things, looking through the trends and graphs for all the different data in that system, and figuring out what went wrong, when it went wrong, which part of the system broke, and trying to figure out how to fix that. And then, once we do figure that out, if it's something we have on hand, parts-wise, then they can just go fix it. Otherwise, we have to figure out what parts we need to replace in order to get that done. And so, I...

0:08:00
Just so on and so forth.

0:08:01
Yeah. So, I do a lot of that kind of stuff. Otherwise We do a lot of capital projects, which is that They are projects that Are not paid for out of the fund of the plant but out of a fund as the company as a whole So, how does that work? They are I guess it's something really trying to learn how it works, honestly. I'm a little new, but it's that they're projects that benefit the public. Understood. So if this makes it more efficient for the public or if we can make more power so that there's less potential for a blackout or any of those kinds of things, then it becomes a capital project.

0:08:47
Understood. Yeah. And so, like you said, some days are busier than others, right? What is like a like a slam day like a slam today? Depends on the problem really like meetings or is it like you looking at books all day or like it?

0:08:59
It can become engineers from other plants are coming up to help with problems And we're all trying to work together or even from the companies who? Made those parts and we're trying to figure out what's wrong with it. They'll all come out and we will have a day of running through all the things I was just talking about, you know, all the trends and everything and that becomes... some days

0:09:25
that's easy, sometimes it takes a month to figure it out. So how important exactly is the collaboration part of things? Like how often do you collaborate

0:09:34
with other engineers and like what is that like? So as for me being a new engineer, it's really important for me to learn how to do the process correctly. So, I like to reach out to other engineers. I try not to do it too often, because I don't want to be annoying. But, otherwise...

0:09:52
It's good that you are annoying.

0:09:53
Yeah, I know. But, you know, at work I try to tone it down a little bit. So, I try to figure something out on my own for just a little bit, until it becomes, you know, like, once I get past this time, it's not like someone's going to be upset that I took this long to figure out this problem. I could ask somebody and it could be done in two seconds.

0:10:12
You're going to have to balance that. I mean, that's like with any new job, right? So I want to like kind of back up now, like back to school. So you're a student and you wanted to get a job when you graduated. So what are the things that you did that sort of prepared you to get the job? Or what were the things that are important to know in school and do in school that ended up like helping you get a job? Obviously you said internship.

0:10:36
I really think that internship is important. Um, and it's really like, if you know what you want to do, if you know what company you're trying to go for, if you know the general area, that is a luxury, my friend, field that you're trying to work in. You know, if you want to work on cars, if you want to work with a certain kind of mechanism, batteries, that kind of stuff, you should look for internships in that field because an internship goes a long way. It's all networking.

0:11:06
On top of that, on top of the networking, you get the actual real life, everyday, what it is to be an engineer, you know?

0:11:13
Yeah, and I was lucky with my internship because I was actually just given projects to work on.

0:11:20
Oh, that's awesome. Is that not how they usually treat interns?

0:11:22
It's, you know, you could be a paper pusher. You could be someone who just watches over. You could have nothing to do, but, yeah. And I was working on my own projects all summer, you know, not being watched over by anybody. So I got to do my job before I was in my job, but some people aren't all that lucky, but you do get to, regardless of what you're doing for your internship, you do get to experience what that place is like, what it's like to be in that place and be around those people, be in that, just in that zone of what you would be doing. Right.

0:11:59
So. And so on top of internships, what else do you think? Or maybe how do you find an internship as an engineering student? Do you just apply to everything on LinkedIn? Does engineering use LinkedIn?

0:12:10
Yeah. How do you do? You can find them online. I found mine. It was one of my dad's friends worked for Envy Energy, and he said that they were opening up. So it's that. It goes back to just knowing people. And if people think you're worthy of a job, then they'll recommend you for something so even then even with the internships if you have family friends, or you've made friends in college you've Met people in different companies you can just go talk to them and that that was a lot of help

0:12:41
Yeah, I I actually just recently saw statistic on I think it was on LinkedIn that I saw it where they're saying that companies aren't so concerned about grades anymore. Like, less companies are concerned about your GPA when you get a job. How important is doing well in your classes in engineering versus like, getting practical knowledge and you know, that kind of stuff? Obviously I don't want to say do bad in your classes, but.

0:13:05
Right, so in engineering, it's kind of a.

0:13:10
Rite of passage?

0:13:12
So, like to get internships, a lot of them you need a 3.0 To get your first job a lot of it you need a 3.0 but once you're past your first job or If you had an internship and they have that requirements, but you did such a good job. They might overlook that so It's hard to say that you know they're overlooking GPAs because most of them aren't,

0:13:38
but there are ways around that.

0:13:40
Right. So. Establishing tenure with companies,

0:13:43
establishing tenure with, you know, someone that you know in the industry. Right. Something like that would probably help you a lot. Exactly. So Josh, what in school did you learn that helped you starting out in your job and like what are some kind of advice you could give to students that want to start a job in engineering? They're maybe already through the process of getting a job, they got an internship, like what are the things that, on the first day they can go in and say

0:14:05
like I don't do this so in engineering there's a lot of like it's all about the grades they want you to get good grades you know they want you to do

0:14:16
better than this that's so odd to me because I feel like you learn all this nitty-gritty math you know all this physics and stuff and you know actually

0:14:22
use it in the workforce some places you would okay because I don't doesn't mean that you... I have five of my friends who went to school and we all have jobs in mechanical engineering and none of us have the exact same day. None of us remotely do the same thing. We might do some kind of writing or some kind of designing, maybe a little bit, but we're all very different. say that you want to focus on one thing that is independent to each person because everybody finds what they like in school, everybody finds what they're passionate about, what they want to go into. So in college, I wish I would have learned more and spent more time retaining information and actually trying to learn a subject than to just try and get the grades.

0:15:16
I completely, completely understand that. That resonates with me a lot.

0:15:19
Yeah, because I feel like I spent most of my time just trying to get the grades because things were hard, but there was no leeway of, hey, it's okay. There's no slap on the wrist.

0:15:36
Something else that I want to bring up, this is something you mentioned off air that we were talking about on a separate conversation. And you were telling me that you would have liked to have someone you could ask questions to when you're in college. How important do you think or how influential would it have been to have someone that's a mentor figure while you're going through college and even now? Do you have one mentor?

0:16:00
I don't entirely have a mentor. I know engineers. I know the engineer that I replaced, but I don't exactly spend any time with them. So to have a mentor, that'd be awesome. But it's definitely not all that... It's not a clean cut of having a mentor makes things better.

0:16:28
Right, yeah, yeah.

0:16:30
Because if I did have a mentor in a field that I wanted to go into and I knew where I wanted to be and they could tell me what they did, then maybe I would have only focused on learning those certain things. Maybe I would have done worse in other things. So I don't know that that would have been the greatest thing for me.

0:16:50
You weren't necessarily like, you didn't know what you wanted to do, right?

0:16:53
Right.

0:16:54
So how did you manage like, figuring it out?

0:16:58
I honestly still haven't.

0:16:59
Okay, cool.

0:17:00
I'm on the same page here then.

0:17:02
Yeah, I'm just working and I enjoy my job. It's lots to learn. There's too many things to learn.

0:17:10
All day by day, you know.

0:17:11
Yeah, but, who knows where I'll be.

0:17:15
Well, at least you're, you know, making money while you're figuring it out. I'm like losing money while I'm figuring it out.

0:17:20
At least you're having fun.

0:17:22
Yeah, I guess.

0:17:23
You're doing this, right?

0:17:24
Yeah, right, you know.

0:17:25
How much do you get paid, bud?

0:17:26
Yeah, for the record, I get paid zero dollars for this. But I also wanna ask you, like, I know you tinker, dude. You tinker all the time. You're always like, I call Josh on the weekend and he's like, hey bro, I'm in the middle of fixing the engine of my boat. Can I call you back? I'm like, alright dude. So how important is it as an engineer to tinker? Do you think that helped you at all?

0:17:49
I think it gives me a different perspective at looking at things. Especially in my job actually, because I work on cars, I work on boats.

0:17:57
You work on, for the record, Josh works on everything. If I need anything done in my house, I will call Josh. He'll be there in a couple hours and he'll just slap stuff together and be like, okay, I'm done. I'll just give him a beer and that's it.

0:18:11
Let me move on with it. So I work on combustion engines. That's what's in a car. And a turbine at a gas power plant is just a combustion engine except it spins instead of having pistons. So the whole idea behind them both is gas and air makes an explosion and things get compressed. So it's a lot of comparison. When people are explaining something to me that I don't understand, like a it's like the spark plugs on a car that's like the this on a car and it makes it like it then that's the click because now I have something to compare it to and it makes sense to me um but otherwise installing new things in a power plant or anywhere really is now I have the perspective of oh I did that in my house and I know that I would have like if I could have thought about this I would have done that so like we're installing different roads and different systems around things. And just thinking about the overall travel of how cars are gonna travel around them or trucks making corners, that's something that not everybody thinks about when they're just like, oh, I want a road that goes that way. It's like, okay, well, now you're gonna have a truck clip your pipe that goes over the road. So, we should probably not put it right there. Yeah.

0:19:35
So.

0:19:36
So, how common is that among engineers? Do you notice a lot of your peers are also tinkerers?

0:19:42
Yeah. Yeah? I do. They're either tinkerers or they're really into something.

0:19:48
Oh, okay.

0:19:49
They could be really into computers or really into gaming or really into something that is allowing them to think a lot.

0:19:58
Gotcha.

0:19:59
That seems to be what engineers typically always are.

0:20:01
They're nerds. Yeah, I was literally just going to do the whole nerd thing, you know. But yeah, that's funny. So do you think also, you know, I mentioned earlier that you can't actually touch any of the things that you, quote unquote, engineer while you say you just fix. Right. I don't even engineer. Yeah. So does you tinkering all the time at home help you in any way of understanding and working with other people?

0:20:27
Yeah, it definitely helps me work with other people, especially when you're putting something somewhere. Because, I know, working on a car, they'll put something stupid in the way, and now you can't get a wrench there. So, you know, when you're actually designing something, it helps to have the knowledge of how a tool works, have the knowledge of how this thing works, so that now when your techs have to go work on that thing, they're not gonna be upset with you for putting this thing in the way.

0:20:54
Right.

0:20:55
Do you work a lot with the techs? Do you work, so is your job a lot of like, collaboration outside of with other engineers? Like I know you mentioned that you talk to other engineers and working through problems and that kind of stuff. Right. But do you actually work with others that are not necessarily engineers?

0:21:09
Yeah, like especially when there's a problem.

0:21:12
Yeah.

0:21:13
That they're going to be the ones fixing or that they might have, they might not know what the problem is, but they know where the problem generally is, then we'll have a conversation about that, or they'll sit down and we'll figure it out together. So it's really helpful.

0:21:26
Or if the house is on fire,

0:21:27
you may have to work with the firemen. The whole plant blows up.

0:21:30
Same thing.

0:21:31
Yeah, same difference.

0:21:32
No.

0:21:33
So I also want to ask you,

0:21:36
what are some of the hard skills that you need as an engineer to be successful? What are the hard skills that you use on a day-to-day basis?

0:21:45
For me, Excel. Programming?

0:21:47
Yeah, programming, logic.

0:21:48
Do you do Excel macros?

0:21:49
I do.

0:21:50
Oh, you do? Yeah, I use Excel and make graphs and trends and everything. So for my job specifically is a lot of knowing how to use a computer, a lot of knowing your way around the different systems that you do use in school. They do teach you a lot of it.

0:22:20
Do they really?

0:22:21
Yeah, we use Excel all the time.

0:22:23
Oh yeah, I mean Excel everyone.

0:22:24
Yeah, but we use Excel all the time. We had whole classes on how to do logic, on how to do coding, on all of those things that you at the time might not think are important. Or like cry through. Yeah, and then you get a job and it's all of that and you're like, I wish I would have paid more attention to that.

0:22:45
Yeah, right.

0:22:46
But it definitely is those kinds of things. I'm just on a computer. That's my day. So writing skills are very important for me And then Excel writing skills in Excel to how do you what I mean writing skills like do you write up reports?

0:23:00
Do you write emails?

0:23:01
We're talking about emails for sure. You're sending them to vendors sending them to different people who you're getting professionalism. Yeah Some of them aren't very professional and you're very friendly and you can have regular conversations with them. Some of them you've never met so it's important to know who you're talking to and how to talk to it. But otherwise, like you asked about soft skills. So soft skills are just knowing, having a general idea of how things work. You know, those aren't, you spend your day looking at things. If you're not doing something you can go out and look at what your specific company does and just understand what it even looks like. Because for me, there's a lot to learn about a power plant. So just having an understanding of, okay, this is how I'm going to look at a drawing, and that's the way it's flowing. So on top of that would be communication skills to talk to people at the plant.

0:24:11
So understand the nitty-gritty system and then also be able to convey that to someone else that doesn't necessarily know.

0:24:18
Right. Or they might know and you might have a question for them. They might be the expert and they'll come out and do a walk down with you and they'll come out and explain something to you. So it could go either way of needing to explain something to somebody or getting explained to and retaining that information.

0:24:35
That's interesting because when I think of your engineering job, I think of you at a computer all day, like, or, you know, looking at like books and numbers and systems or whatever all day and like not really talking to people. So it's kind of like, I'm a little bit dumb, not dumbfounded, but I'm just like surprised.

0:24:48
I spend most days not talking to people.

0:24:49
Okay, well. I'm not that far off.

0:24:51
Most days there's lots of books and lots of tabs open on different PDFs and trying to figure things out, but it is a lot of communication. That's probably the most important thing because everybody's heard the joke of like, what engineer designed this? Because they don't leave the desk, they don't leave the books. So I find it really important to go out and look at what I'm designing. And regardless of whether someone thinks I need to or not.

0:25:21
I couldn't even imagine you in a chair all day. I mean, you'd go crazy. Oh, I do. I would imagine. Josh gets to the point where he's sitting in the chair and he'll just start spinning in circles in his chair because he doesn't know what to do with himself. Don't call me out like that. You did mention talking about writing and stuff. So I wanted to know, is your writing very factual? Is it very logical, explicative, descriptive, or is it more persuasive and

0:25:48
rhetoric? Really, you're not really ever trying to persuade somebody. There's not really a persuasive writing. It's really descriptive because most of the time you're defining a problem. Or you're trying to get an exact part that we don't know about yet. So the more descriptive you can be in that, the more professional and in-depth detail you can give.

0:26:18
So I imagine, like you just said, attention to detail is critical.

0:26:21
Right. So, and you were asking about writing, I write a lot of work scopes.

0:26:27
Can you explain what a work scope is for those that don't know? I have no idea what it is.

0:26:32
For those of you that don't know, me. But it would be, it depends at what point in the process you are because you might be trying to sell what the idea is to the company first before it's even being given to contractors to build. So at that point you're writing, okay, I need these things because of this reason and I want it and this is the reason why, these are the benefits, these are the alternatives and that way the company and people who are going to be spending money on that can actually see oh, this would benefit them and it would be cost effective to us in five years. So there's all of those details that go into that, but then on the other side, once a project is approved, then you have a work scope that goes to contractors, and that's defining exactly the work that they need to do, exactly where they're going to be putting things, exactly the date, exactly the...

0:27:35
Very factual, very specific, very detailed, oriented writing.

0:27:38
You need to write that in a way that there's no

0:27:41
just clear, yeah.

0:27:43
Well, it has to be very clear.

0:27:44
And solid, you can say. And solid, yeah. Okay, understood. So, Josh, in the interest of time, here we're running out of time, I want to give you an opportunity to give any last advice to students out there, to, I don't know, your fellow rookie engineers or whatever.

0:27:59
Well, engineering's rough. We've all made it.

0:28:04
Yeah. I mean, you made it through college. That's a pretty big achievement, I guess, right?

0:28:07
Yeah, I'd say so. My parents think so. Yeah. But, otherwise, you know, pay attention in school and try to learn as much as you can. Grades are important, but they're not what make you the best. Everything, yeah. The actual knowledge behind it is. So, and then on top of that would be just networking. Those are the two biggest things

0:28:30
I have for them. All right. Well, Josh, thank you so much for your time, for coming out here. I'm so glad I got to sit in here with you and chat

0:28:35
with you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

0:28:37
Of course, any 30 minutes I get with Josh is like just the greatest conversation in my life. So anyway, all right, that's it for the episode. Thanks so much for listening to the Job Forum. If you want any more details or have any questions, visit my website at manaziz.com. M-A-N-A-Z-I-Z dot com. M-A-N-A-Z-I-Z dot com.

0:28:57
Welcome to the Job Forum.

Transcribed with Cockatoo