Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1355791
REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2021 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE I I-CONNECT007 113 Vaughan: I always enjoy the keynotes, in gen- eral, and especially John Mitchell's keynote about the factory of the future. And then I really liked Sean DuBravac's keynote. For our Emerging Engineer track, we were required to take four professional development courses, and I think two of them had to be in the Fac- tory of the Future track. I really like to get that high-level explanation of where IPC sees that going, and the steps to get there. But as far as the conference, PD16 really stands out. Ben Jordan presented "A Begin- ner's Guide to RF and Microwave PCB Design and Prototyping" parts 1 and 2. He was excel- lent. You could tell that this wasn't his first time doing online teaching. I'm a sort of visual, a kinetic learner. Ben presented visuals within his slide shows, and he had his stylus out, writ- ing live on the screen. Ben was putting things out that are generally at a very technical level, difficult to grasp on a first pass. He was putting it in layman's terms, so you weren't having knowledge overload. I never felt like, "Oh my gosh, I don't know if I'm going to remember anything." I would say, they were all good presentations, but that one certainly stood out to me, where you could tell that he had been teaching before. I got a lot out of Ben's course, especially. He just had stuff fly- ing everywhere! Shaughnessy: As part of the Emerging Engi- neer program, IPC schedules certain classes that you need to attend. Isn't that how it works? Vaughan: Yes, it certainly helped. ey pro- vide us with what's called a passport every year. ey encourage us to do as much as we can, but it gives you the minimum require- ments so you can say that you've met that year's initiative. It's a three-year program. Since they had moved the committee meet- ings outside of the conference time, anything that was a requirement was an automatic plug in the calendar. And then from there, it was just a matter of looking at the remainder of the schedule and determining where I had blocks of time. Shaughnessy: Good. Were there any changes that you would suggest? Any recommendation for IPC? Vaughan: One of our requirements was to do some virtual booth visits and that process was a little bit more cumbersome. And now when you're throwing in vendors from all over the world, all kinds of different server set-ups and schedules, that part of it was a little bit more difficult to nail down. But once you were able to get in there and figure out how to get to the virtual booths, it was great. Overall, it went off better than you could have imagined, abso- lutely. Shaughnessy: Hopefully, next year APEX EXPO will be an in-person event. Vaughan: Sure. IPC did an awesome job, but I would assume that this is not going to be the way of the future because there's something to be said for actually going to shows. S&T Jesse Vaughan