We begin our story at the Eastland-Fairfield Career as a junior in high school, in the sleepy hinterlands of Columbus, Ohio. My earliest memory was of learning how to do the western-union wire tie technique for soldering. I quickly fell in love with both the curriculum and the hands-on lab projects we completed. My time at the vocational center was also a renaissance of French study. I found a self-paced French class and completed three years of material in one year. My 2013 capstone for the two-year technician’s certificate was to coordinate and manage the construction of a weather balloon with the help of my classmates. We set (and reached) the goal of sending a balloon to 100,000 feet.

I was blessed that summer of 2013 and spent six weeks in Japan as an exchange student. An experience that is still precious to me to this day.

I then entered the Columbus state community college during the Fall of 2013 intending to complete a transfer degree and then earn my Bachelor of Electrical Engineering. There was never any question about what I would study. Unfortunately, I was unable to manage the workload of full-time school and full-time work. I was both fired and failed the community college in the spring of 2014.

So, I packed my bags and moved to Portland. My original intention was to move from Portland to Japan at the earliest opportunity. I spent a year in Portland working in restaurants and earning my state residency. I spent nights and weekends studying pre-calculus so that I could prepare for the mathematics placement exam. I succeeded in gaining admission to the Portland Community College. I completed my first semester by the end of 2015 and then transferred directly to Portland State. A decision I am very glad I made because it opened up the door for my first internship.

I found my first internship on the corkboard in the study lounge. It wasn’t called an internship, but I knew that it would mean that. It was the IEEE Reliability and Electronics Aircraft conference in Toulouse, France. And a kind French gentleman named Alain funded both the trip to the conference and set up an internship. I started interning at the IRT Saint-Exupery national laboratory in April of 2018.

My task during the six months I spent at IRT Saint Exupery was to develop an explicitly defined methodology for implementing a novel reliability technique for devices below 14 nm. The method  -MSTORM – argues that:

Reliability models using only single failure functions like the hot carrier injection model are not sufficient. As device dimensions morph and shrink, it is possible to have a distribution of relative failure modes impacting the device independently or codependently. So, the model defined a method for isolating failure modes across certain subsets of the 3-space defined by frequency, time, and temperature

I had heard of FPGAs in my classes, and I knew that the graduate students had to mess with them. I received a Xilinx computer vision development board to practice and demonstrate the failure methodology described above. I was incredibly fascinated while learning how to use Vivado and Xilinx SDK. To this day, I still consider FPGAs as a crucial tool for embedded programming due to their speed and ability to be reconfigured. I compiled my design into a paper published in the IEEE conference proceedings.

During that internship, I was also working remotely as an undergraduate lab assistant at PSU for Doctor Dan Hammerstrom. Dr. Hammerstrom was interested in modeling the structure of the neocortex. Particularly the highest levels of the neocortex. Collaborating with him was my first taste of software and I remember feeling guilty for not being as proficient as the other students in the research group. Throughout the experience working in the BICL lab, I learned not only the fundamentals of Python and machine learning but also about the nature and value of software skills. It was clear to me at that point that I would not be able to reach my career goals unless I was proficient as a programmer.

At the end of the 2018 research assistant season, I built and presented a poster board of the work I had done on modeling a cortical layer using the Numenta library. While there, I met a gentleman from Intel named Markus Kuhn, he set up with one of his engineers, Ben Buford, who then hired me to develop Python for two summer internships for machine learning as well as for animation and visualization of data.

The first Intel internship took place during the Summer of 2019. I worked at one of their fabrication facilities in Hillsboro Oregon and was responsible for improving the accuracy and generalizability of a neural network used to detect wafer crystallization faults. I got to play around with CUDA acceleration, and I learned how to use tf.Keras as a convenient interface for TensorFlow. My second internship in Summer 2020 focused on creating an FFMpeg and Tkinter data visualization tool for a destructive microscopy technique.

Between those two internships, I also worked as an intern from Fall 2019 to spring 2020 at a small company called Stevens Water. Stevens Water makes embedded systems for farming, landscape, and agriculture. One of their flagship products is a soil sensor that looks like a pizza table that you push into the earth (here the earth is a pizza). I was given the responsibility of adding functionality to a Python command line tool that allowed technicians to test probes and store probe test data in an AWS MySQL database.

It was a wonderful experience. Proficient engineers had developed the codebase, and it was easy to add functionality safely to the software and deliver updates agilely. I got to work quite deeply in the Linux space and was responsible for developing a Docker instance of the Python probe tester for distribution across the factory. I worked with SDI-12 communication protocol as well as with SQL in the form of scripts used to perform tasks with the AWS database.

By the time the second Intel internship was starting, the world was a quite different place. During the first few months of 2020, I was working for Stevens Water and intended to stay there. I had received an offer for another Intel internship during Summer 2020 and was hesitant about accepting. I really enjoyed the small-scale atmosphere of Stevens water and I found a genuinely nice room in a beautiful home near Mt Tabor – one of Portland’s best parks. I had enrolled in the early placement master’s pathway at Portland state and was excited to dig deeper with both my Python proficiency as well with my research interests.

Then, all my plans were erased.

I have a very vivid memory of when I first heard about the Coronavirus being seen in Wuhan. I immediately purchased some masks and wore one to class during the next few weeks. I looked silly at the time – the only person wearing a mask during February 2020. Between my apparent ability to foresee the future, and discipline to receive my shots as early as possible, I have never been diagnosed with Covid-19.

But that didn’t help my employment situation. I was still able to land the summer Internship at Intel. I had hoped (and discussed with my manager) the possibility of coming to work full-time at Intel after I graduated. My manager said that would be great. But unfortunately, Intel had instituted a hiring Freeze by the time my internship ended.

So, I moved back in with my mom in Colorado Springs. I am very thankful that I moved back in with her when and why I did. I spent the Fall of 2020 sleeping on my mother’s couch and applying for jobs by day. After some diligence, I was able to land a position as an embedded system and electrical engineer at a small Canadian startup. I could work remotely, and I would be compensated in equity. It sounded like a good first job to me, so I promptly accepted part-time work for the company as a contractor.

After only a few weeks working at Sawback, I was picked up by ManTech. I remember how kind the team was during our interview. It was a stark contrast to the other position I was interviewing for at the time. In the end, it came down to that. I chose to join the team in Maryland because it would be a peaceful place to grow. Of course, the position aligned with my career goals of mastering radio frequency engineering as well through a built-in mentorship with an RF subject matter expert.

We have reached the present day.

I was hired at ManTech as a systems engineer. At the time, my mental model of a systems engineer was similar to that of many others: someone who has work experience in more than one sub-domain of engineering. There is a better way. ManTech began to provide me training, through a series of mentors and materials, with the goal of becoming a certified system model builder. I learned about the world of model-based systems engineering, which has done nothing short of changing my life and the way in which I see the world.

When I saw my first diagram, my mind didn’t go to block diagrams, it went to hieroglyphics. I could almost immediately conclude that what I was looking at was a revolutionary technology on par with, I believe, the invention of writing itself.

To understand the value added by model-based systems engineering, remember that humans are highly visual in their perception of reality. So, we invented writing as a way of taking advantage of our eyesight to further our communication abilities as a species. Unfortunately, we still tend to use natural language to describe socio-technical systems. The vocabulary, syntax, and ambiguity of a language like English has led to more design errors and fatal accidents than any conversion between metric and imperial.

SysML presents a language and associated vocabulary that allow a model builder to unambiguously describe a system and its functionality in a visual way. This key truth is what allows SysML and its practitioner to act as efficient and powerful science communicators and practitioners. A model builder can go from architecting a system of systems to negotiating requirements with stakeholders using the same tool. That’s a powerful thing.

Models can therefore act as a single source of truth. This is crucial for distributed teams, working with distributed systems. A well-maintained system model is, in some sense, the holy book of a given engineering project. It acts as the single source of truth and decision-making throughout the entire life cycle of a system design.

I am also pursuing my Master of Engineering in computer engineering at Ohio University online. I really like embedded systems and signal processing!