The skills and techniques learned through the AE curriculum are highly portable. Hear from three AE alums who are using their degrees for aero-related careers. You'll hear what led them to a path outside of aerospace engineering, how the skills they learned at AE have translated to their professional field, what the biggest challenge was in transitioning to a new field of work, and what advice they have for others looking to follow a similar career path.
Violet Kamber (BS '19) currently works at FCA US LLC (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) rotating in Jeep Brand Marketing as a CIE (Chrysler Institute of Engineering participant) experiencing assignments within the FCA Engineering, Powertrain, Quality and Manufacturing organizations as a full-time employee. The CIE program offers a broad range of auto industry exposure. Since June of 2019, she has experienced Jeep Interior Hard Trim, Vehicle Integration focused on a new Jeep large SUV,and Vehicle Integration in the SRT group focused on Dodge.
Steve Macenski (BS '17) is the Open-Source Robotics Lead at Samsung Research, where he consults for robotics groups and works on flagship open-source projects. He is a member of the Open-Source Robotics Foundation's ROS2 Technical Steering Committee and oversees the development of the mobile robotics ecosystem. His work has been confirmed in use on 6 continents by over 10,000 robots in retail, hospitals, oil and gas, libraries, and more.
Prior to his role at Samsung Research, Steve was the employee #7 and Lead Robotics Engineer at Simbe Robotics, where he developed popular open-source ROS extensions for SLAM and 3D perception for dynamic environments. He also advises early-stage robotics startups leveraging open-source tools.
Parth Patel (BS '15) began his career at GE Aviation as part of the Edison Engineering Development Program, which is a full-time work, part-time school, rotational program. During the program, Parth completed three, one-year long rotations in different areas of the company; specifically, in design engineering, testing & physics-based forecasting analytics, and finance BI. At the end of this program, Parth completed his part-time M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Ohio State University. He then remained at GE Aviation for another year working as a data scientist. After this he returned to higher education for a second time, this time attending a full-time Master’s in Analytics program at Northwestern University. Most recently, Parth spent this summer working as a data scientist intern at Facebook and will be returning there as a full-time data scientist at the beginning of next year.
