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AUGUST 2023 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 57 he interned at Stratos for two years on and off during the summer with a little bit of remote work during the school years. Aaron said he has always loved aviation and decided to focus on mechanical engineering, especially when he started his internship at Stratos. Austin Alley joined Stratos about six years ago and is now an engineering supervisor and CAD manager. While having an applied phys- ics degree and mechanical engineering minor from the University of Idaho, he said he learned core principles of engineering from growing up on a farm. "at's where I learned my mechan- ical engineering, fixing the tractors," he says. "I learned from the start how to turn a wrench and from that, how design could be improved. For example, whoever designed our tractor made it so that I need to take four things off to get to a fuel filter or whatever. I was cognizant then that the people hated poor engineering. So, I definitely wanted to change that." John Smoker joined Stratos about five years ago. He has a general engineering degree with an emphasis in mechanical engineering. "e degree program was such that the fundamen- tals and theory were really emphasized. So, we didn't get into much practical stuff; a lit- tle bit of SolidWorks, a little bit of Fault Tree Analysis. But it was really a base of mathemat- ics, physics, some programming, and a good amount of electronics as well." e common thread I found talking to these young engineers is their desire to collaborate with the team and serve their internal custom- ers, and they don't take this lightly. Aaron, you're in an industry where failure can cause fatalities. How does that inform the way you approach your job, or the way you see the work that you're doing? Aaron Park: e added weight and responsi- bility is definitely in my mind as I'm creating drawings or designing parts. ere are a lot of standards and specifications that we need to keep in mind. And, of course, all the aero- space standards are not something I learned in school. I ask a lot of questions to try to merge the skills I learned there with what is required here to make sure that what I do is safe for the aircra and the people in it. I also realize there can be a disconnect between manufacturers and engineers in indus- try; the engineers don't always know what's going on in manufacturing. I try to learn how, for example, our welder likes to see welding callouts on drawings, or how the CNC opera- tors will interpret the drawing and how we can best have that symbiotic relationship. A better connection reduces the chance of error. We see this disconnect across a lot of indus- tries. We hear fabricators complain that many designers just throw the designs over the wall and want the fabricator to figure it out. This is where your approach of learning who your customers are and what their needs are makes a lot of sense. In fact, another com- mon theme we hear is to have designers learn the manufacturing process. Park: While I was at Boise State, they updated the mechanical engineering curriculum with help from the local manufacturing industry. Micron and a host of smaller companies located in Boise were asked what skills, both technical and so, graduates were lacking or that they needed to know. Being able to work with man- ufacturers and getting to know the equipment with hands-on experience was a big part of CNC operator and machinist Rod McMahon.