>> Well, I came to the University of Southern California for my undergraduate degree.
I've majored in mechanical engineering.
And I chose mechanical engineering because when I was very young,
I wanted to get into the special effects industry, and I knew that I had to go to college
as a requirement of my parents, so I decided the best way to do that was
to get a technical degree in mechanical engineering and then try
and apply those lessons to special effects.
My first year out of school, I actually achieved that goal.
I worked in the special effects industry working on motion pictures, television commercials,
and the like, doing a wide variety of things that kind of seem outside the scope
of your typical mechanical engineer.
Working on movie monsters and doing a lot of prop fabrication, you know,
just wouldn't really click with what you would typically envision an engineer doing --
you know, CAD programming, drafting, loads and loads of spreadsheets, but my basis --
or my base in mechanical engineering really conditioned me to learning how to solve problems
and take that mindset and apply them to a creative process where you're working
with a customer that has, say, less than defined technical requirements.
Again, how do you judge how -- how scary an effect is?
Or, you know, I need a large explosion.
Well, how do you quantify that?
And so those are some of the challenges we were faced with in working with --
working in the special effects industry.
I'm actually on my third phase of my career.
So after the special effects job I had,
I transitioned into the consulting construction engineering field where I was working
on building systems for data centers, hospitals, office spaces, and even back a little bit
into the entertainment industry working on soundstages and some of their office spaces.
So I worked there for about seven years and then bridged
over into the aerospace industry building on my past experience with building systems.