Informational Interview: Engineering Career Insights

Informational Interview Report
I am a first year Aerospace Engineering major, who will soon be switching to
major in Mechanical Engineering and will be graduating in 2029. My purpose and goal
for the informational interview that I conducted was to educate myself in the field of
engineering and help me better understand engineering careers by asking questions
that I thought would help me make future decisions about my major, career, and life in
general.
The engineer who I decided to Interview was David Cifuentes, a family friend. He
has worked in many different engineering disciplines over his career such as paper
engineering, engineering sales and engineering management, but the one discipline he
has worked in that is most pertaining to my major is process/system engineering, so I
decided to focus mostly on that. When he was a process engineer, he worked at Black
Clawson, but he currently works at Flottweg Separation Technology.
For my first question I asked him to tell me what a typical day on the job is like,
he responded by telling me that he has two types of days at his job: a field day and an
office day. During the field days his typical day would consist of going to a site where his
client had a system or process that needed to be optimized or improved upon, where he
would analyze and sketch every necessary area of the system to figure out where it
could be optimized. During an office day he would take the sketches and drawings
made during field days, and figure out what needed to be done to improve the system to
the clients needs, whether it be using new or different types of machinery, or laying out
their piping system in a more efficient manner, etc.
My second question was what he likes most and least about his field, to which he
said he liked most to problem solve and be in the team environment that he was a part
of as well as figuring out what goes into a solution. He said that he disliked most, in his
words: “accountants telling me that I can’t solve the problem how I want to solve the
problem” which we both had a laugh about. Next, I asked him what skills are required in
his position on a day-to-day basis, to which he mentioned three main things: Technical
Competence, The Ability to Collaborate, and most importantly the Ability to Deliver, such
as managing a projects time and resources to ensure it gets done, which he said was
the most important of the three.
For my fourth question, I asked him to describe corporate culture, to which he
had a lot to say. He described corporate culture in his field as “short sighted, too top
down, and too focused on the business side of things.” He said that the people who
make the big decisions are too focused on yearly profits, and not focused enough on
long term effects of decisions they make. He said that “if you want to figure out how to
solve a problem, ask the people on the floor who are actually solving them.”
My fifth question was asking what he found most enjoyable about his field, to
which he unsurprisingly answered that he likes to solve problems with all types of
different people, and I feel like this sentiment is common among engineers. For my next
question I asked what attributes aside from pay influenced his decision to work at the
company he liked most, to which he said The people he worked with, Having a good
boss, and having a good product that he wanted to be a part of making, and, in his
words: “Working for a competent company making competent decisions.”
The seventh question I asked him was what soft skills he thought were most
important to develop. He listed three main things; first he said organization, and how it is
critical to develop even when it doesn’t come naturally to you, and that you need to
recognize when you become unorganized. Then he said collaboration, and that you
need to be able to work with people and understand what they are saying as they are
saying it, without making assumptions. Finally, he said that you need work ethic, and
that you must do your best, do your part, and have pride in your work.
Next, I asked him how and why he decided to become an engineer. He said that
when he was in elementary school his parents said, “you’re so good at math and
science, why don’t you become an engineer” to which he said “okay!”. Later on, he
toured Miami University and their Paper Engineering facilities, and decided he wanted
to go there. He said he loved the program, but that the pulp and paper industry
collapsed soon within 5 years of when he graduated, so he moved on to process
engineering. He said that he didn’t worry too much about everything, and enjoyed where
life went, and that he’s happy with how it worked out for him.
For my ninth question I asked him what parts of his job he found most
challenging. He said that there was lots of pressure on the engineering side of things,
and lots of professional pressure to “do the job right”. He said there was lots of pressure
on delivering even when things go wrong, as well as the pressure of doing the best job
possible.
For my tenth and final question, I asked him how he got his first job. He told me
about how he got his first professional job through a co-op, while he was still in college.
He told me how he had 3 co-ops throughout college, and how he used them to build off
one another, and build his resume through repeated experience in the same field. He
said that his final co-op offered him a job out of college, which is how he got his first
professional job. The one thing that surprised me the most from all of what he said was
how he got his first professional job from a co-op out of college. I did not think co-ops
were that prominent and established back then. It also surprised me how similar some
of his answers were to how I felt about some of them, proving that a lot of engineers are
very similar.
My purpose for this informational interview was to educate myself in the field of
engineering and help me better understand engineering careers. I feel like the interview
I conducted achieved what I was hoping for in quite a few different ways. For example,
some of the skills that he said are most important are among those that I have, but
some others I could certainly improve upon, which gave me a good understanding of
where I stand in my discipline. Furthermore, what he said about co-ops further informed
me about just how important co-ops and experiences like them are early on in your
career. And lastly learning about what his job entails and what a typical workday is like
for him helped me understand what some of the things I do in my career might look like.
After the interview, and especially after reflecting about the purpose for the
interview, I realized that there are some things that I could improve upon to better my
career and gain more experience in my field, and some actionable items I could
implement to improve them. One actionable item for me would be to become more
involved with engineering related student organizations, namely the Formula Bearcats
SAE Racing Team for me, this would help me gain a considerable amount of experience
in my field and would be a great thing to put on my resume. Another actionable item for
me would be building my network, things such as going to the career fair, applying for
co-ops, internships at different companies, even informational interviews like this one
would be great ways to do this, and it is certainly a very important thing to do to be
competitive early on in my career. A final actionable item for me would be to become a
lot more organized, to prepare for the organization that is going to be necessary for me
in the future. I am not a very organized person, and the interview only reinforced my
knowledge that organization is an aspect of my personal and professional life that I will
have to improve to be more successful in both.
In summary, I do believe that this opportunity has been very helpful for me
currently and will be very helpful for my engineering career in the future. It was very
interesting hearing all what David Cifuentes had to say, and learning about his past
experiences as an engineer. I also believe that this interview did educate me
significantly in the field of engineering and helped me better understand engineering
careers. This is knowledge that I am grateful that I will be able to pull from and use in
the future, to apply to my professional life where I can. I am very grateful to David
Cifuentes for this opportunity, and I look forward to possibly maintaining contact with
him professionally in the future.