Prompted Post 3: Interview a Professional

For this post I interviewed my cousin. Since he is working and had a rather hectic weekend, I asked my questions by phone.  He is a mechanical engineer at a tree care and forestry product manufacturer. I talked to him about his job along with what kind of writing he does. We also spoke about the transition from college to the work place since he is a recent graduate.

 My first question was, quite simply, what do you do? He told me he is responsible for creating project designs of ether current product modifications or making plans for completely new products. For instance one of the products they make are wood chippers ranging from residential sizes, up to huge industrial wood chippers that destroy large trees. He told me that in this particular occupation that lots of his work is actually centered around 3D planning software. However, he does have to do the occasional calculation to see if using certain parts will work in certain applications and calculating how long this part might last.

                Next I asked him what his favorite part of his job was. He told me his favorite part was bringing an idea into a design and putting all the pieces together on the computer. I think doing something like this would be really cool. I have taken a class where we used similar software in a drafting class and I really enjoyed working with that program.

                My third question was “what are your biggest challenges?” His response was that sometimes his instructions are rather vague, and it is very difficult to try to design like this. For instance he might only have a small idea to work with, often with very unclear requirements, and he has to make a full design for something when he doesn't know exactly what this idea is expected to be. But it is the job he said.

                Fourth I asked “what is something you wish you had known about the job when you started?” He wished he would have known to ask more questions when he started. Being new he didn’t want to seem so green to his more experienced coworkers. However by doing this he took longer to find his way around the job.

                Next I got into the writing part of his job. He told me he mostly writes emails to people in other departments. These questions are usually clerical things, like what is meant by this or that and what part number is this. He also occasionally writes reports for new materials or process for the job.

Then it came up about what he does to revise and edit his work. What he said he usually does, in the case of emails, is he will write the email then do other work for a few minutes and revisit the email and once he is satisfied he will send it off.

After this we were just talking about the differences between working and the classroom. He thought that you don’t really need most of the actual things you learn in school; however, school is important to get people ready for working in a professional place. Most of what is important in school is learning skills to be successful if the work place and you wind up relearning most everything about what you need for the job at on sight training.