At my most recent co-op I worked on a team of scientists and engineers to fabricate primary metal via clean electrochemical processes. The company, Infinium, was a fairly young start up composed of about 18 people. We had quarterly progress/production goals that we had to meet to keep our investors giving us money and therefore had a lot of strict timelines. That meant that on a daily basis, aside from trying to work on our big picture problem (how do we make this metal production system work?) we had all kinds of more focused problems (how do we quantify the progress we have made on this particular aspect of our project? How can we do this experiment on a budget and time restraint?). Solving all these projects took the involvement of engineers, finance people, chemists, and a machine shop among others. On top of that, often times one person would fill the roll of two positions; for example one of my coworkers played the part of both engineer and lab manager, there was also a two month span when we had no finance people working for the company.
All this considered, my last co-op was the most transdisciplinary environment I have ever worked in. I realized that the most important part of making this all work was communicating effectively. Everything was accomplished quickly because of the fact that most of the time the whole company was under one very small roof. This also made it easy to figure out when we needed to reach outside for help. If no one at the company was well versed in a certain topic, we’d reach out to other servicing companies to get answers.
Personally, I struggled communicating with my supervisor. I spent most of my time on a subproject focused on aluminum. My team was made up of only three people. My supervisor was not an engineer; he had a background in physics and chemistry and was extremely smart, but lacked practicality and some communication skills. Many hours were spent by my supervisor spit balling a bunch of ideas, and myself and the other engineer figuring out which of his ideas we could actually apply. Communication improved as I got more comfortable with my supervisor and the chemistry we were doing; I started to understand what he was saying from the perspective of a scientists versus an engineer and I could give input as someone with a mechanical background. We made an unbelievable amount of progress in the six months I worked at Infinium.
It was a unique and rewarding experience to work at such an interdisciplinary company. It made me understand all the different kinds of work that make a business successful, and forced me to push out of my comfort zone and approach problems with a more open mind. Untimately, it forced me to collaborate with people who had all kinds of different strengths and expertise which I think is a fundamentally important skill to have as an engineer.
