Episode 9: A Celebration in STEM in Industry with Chief Technology Officer at WVIA

Transcript

Welcome to BLaST the Airwaves with BLaST Intermediate Unit 17. Here at BLaST Intermediate Unit 17, we strive to transform lives and communities through educational services. For this season, we have a special guest co-host who is working to create and sustain pathways to employment in our region by uniting her community around common goals in STEM learning. This season’s guests come from 9 counties total, representing different local industries all across Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania. I’d like to introduce you to Alexandra Konsur-Grushinski, STEM Services Coordinator for NEIU 19 and current lead of NEPA STEM Ecosystem. Alexandra, welcome! Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be able to work with you for our Celebration of STEM in Industry this year. Our STEM Ecosystem is holding a weeklong series of free events and opportunities highlighting industry partners and the benefits they have in our 5 county region. Our hope is that by listening to the wide variety of employment opportunities available in our region from folks in our community who live it every day, we can shed a light on what’s possible for our young people. On this podcast, we will provide you with educational solutions and resources for all, no matter the learning environment. So teachers, administrators, students, caregivers, industry partners, what are you waiting for? What would happen if we started questioning? What if our students and educators got the opportunities to sit down with members of the community? What if we bridged that gap? What connections would we discover? It’s time to blast the airwaves.
Rebecca: Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Joe Glynn, Chief Technology Officer for WVIA and Alexandra Konsur-Grushinski, STEM services coordinator of NEIU 19 and current lead NEPA STEM Ecosystem. Joe, Alexandra, thanks so much for joining us today to discuss STEM skills used in your industry. Specifically we will be discussing how knowledge of different STEM skills are important in your current job position, Joe. So, are you two ready to blast the airwaves?
Joe: I am.
Alexandra: Absolutely.
Rebecca: Awesome. So Joe, why don’t we start, can you tell us a little bit more about what you do in industry at WVIA?
Joe: Ok, well we are a part of the media industry. Particularly television and radio broadcasting, although we also stream as well as most companies like ours do. And my job as Chief Technology Officer has me overseeing all the technology and that means the people that work in this department, the technology department which includes IT, everybody is familiar with IT these days, but we also have the transmission part of it where we broadcast so we work with the television transmitters and all of the associated studio equipment from cameras on from camera or microphone right to receiver in your home that’s what we’re responsible for.
Rebecca: Thank you.
Alexandra: So Joe, what you do is very interesting, and I wonder if you could talk to our listeners a little bit about maybe what your typical day might look like.
Joe: Okay, well you know when I first started in this industry, my typical day was pretty much repairing broadcast equipment, as well as installing and testing new broadcast equipment but that was many decades ago. And our industry like all have changed and along with that my job titles have changed over a number of promotions that I got to the point where I’m pretty much do mostly a desk job overseeing the department. And one of the caveats to my job is I’m also in charge of the facilities, so in a sense, I’m essentially a facilities manager so everything about the building, the HVAC systems in the building and even getting a lawn cut falls under my jurisdiction, so I wear multiple hats. But for the most part, I’d just say it’s an office job, a desk job at this point in my life.
Alexandra: So regular hours?
Joe: Regular hours, but on-call twenty-four hours a day 7 days a week you know for people who listen to the radio or watch TV or try to livestream us, we have to be there all the time so when something goes wrong and that could be at any given moment we are on top of it so me or someone on my team has to address it we can do that in a number of ways sometimes it just physically requires coming into the building here or to the transmitter sites. And other times we can do it from a computer at home or even from our phones at that point.
Alexandra: So you may be like the electrical engineers that work out on the lines that you dread storms and bad weather coming? Is that something that affects you and how busy you are?
Joe: That is in fact the case. A storm will cause power outages, power outages cause problems with electronic equipment and every storm that comes through puts us at risk of being out of operation for a period of time and that’s something we try not to have any downtime. So our goal is to give 24 hours a day 7 days a week service and we’re pretty good at that were probably at 99.99% of the time we are on, but yes storms cause all kinds of problems even in satellite reception. We still use satellite reception here for a lot of our national programs from PBS, and if you get a big enough storm, it will limit the reception of the satellite for a period of time, so storms are always an issue.
Alexandra: I’ll bet.
Rebecca: That’s a lot to do under one role, so 24/7, all day every day so I’m sure it’s very much appreciated by your colleagues as well. I’m interested to hear you said how you have received promotions and moved up the ladder so to say what college or your career path or even classes did you take to set yourself in this line of line of work?
Joe: I am a graduate of Johnson College which was formerly Johnson Technical Institute and I have a specialized associate degree in electronic and fluidic technology. Fluidics might be a word a lot of people aren’t familiar with, but basically that is both hydraulics and pneumatics and the best way to described that would be when you take your car in for new tires, they typically put the car on a lift, that’s a hydraulic lift and the machine uses pressure to bring the car up to a height that a person could work on it. And then a lot of times you’ll hear them take the tires off, lug nuts off of the wheels with an air gun, which is a pneumatic device, so it’s a combination of pneumatics and hydraulics there. That I don’t use as much in my job as electronics, but the electronics portion I use on almost a daily basis. And even the electrical part because it uses those skill in that sense.
Rebecca: Yeah so how did you receive training for that? Did you specifically take classes in college? Like if I’m a student in my junior year or senior year of high school and I’m intrigued by this, what would you recommend to them to look for?
Joe: Well it’s hard to say because there’s so many different aspects of it, and I ended up in the broadcast engineering side of things but my initial thought was just to work with electronics and I didn’t know where that would lead me in the end. There’s a lot, you know electronics encompasses a lot of things: there’s biomed electronics, there’s cellular telephone type electronics, there’s home, there’s consumer electronics area. There were a lot of different areas I just happened to land in the broadcast side which was perfect for me.
Alexandra: So Joe, this is very interesting, what you do and never would have thought that in your current position that hydraulics and pneumatics would have been in your background. So how do you use STEM skills in your position?
Joe: Well, I use them every day in some shape, manner or form. I mean now let’s talk about the M in there, the math. So I can use math for a lot of things, primarily lately budgeting. I mean I’m responsible for a million dollars a year of the station’s budget, so the math is very important on the budgeting side, but there’s also things like when we have to replace a generator we have to do the math to figure out what size generator would be necessary to operate a specific facility. Be it a translator site, or the building right here. So you’re using the math side for that. The technology side is obvious you know and I don’t want to get too far off the question, but I was once asked by a PBS person what is technology? And everybody, the whole group of people was once asked this and the dictionary description is: the branch of knowledge dealing with engineering or applied sciences. That’s the dictionary version of what is technology, but he had a better definition. I always liked that he said “technology is just simply something that wasn’t there when you were growing up.” It wasn’t there when you were growing up. So you know we all come in the house or the office so we turn our lights on but we never think: Wow, what technology that is! but to my grandparents that was technology. They didn’t have lights in them when they first bought the house. So this is something that I like as a definition because technology keeps changing. To me self-driving cars are technology, but I suspect to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren they’re just going to be normal, just like the lights for me. I don’t think of the lights that turn on as technology. So I don’t know if that’s a good definition or not but I hope it answers your question.
Alexandra: Absolutely. So one of the perennial arguments that students make is: when am I ever going to have to use this? So, they’re in classes at school and they’re asking: why do we need to learn this? When are we ever going to use it? And so I’m hoping that you can help us Joe, put this argument to rest with some of the skills that you use in your position. So what skills can you point to that you use every day that our students learn in school?
Joe: That is the perfect question to ask a guy like me because I was that guy, that person who said: I don’t need this, I’m never going to need this in my life, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. I can you give you a couple of examples cuz I’m an example kind of guy. We take algebra and they tell you about two trains leaving the station, and I’ve never thought that I’d have to do a problem like that whatsoever but when I got into my field, the thing that I love so much about electronics, I found out there’s a lot of algebra in electronics. And I realized too late that I didn’t pay enough attention when I was in class because it didn’t relate to what I loved and thought about. I didn’t really care about trains, but I did care about electronics and circuits. So that’s the number one example. The second example was English and public speaking, things like that. I thought I will never need this. I don’t even like getting up in front of the group. I am not comfortable, but as I got those promotions we talked about, I had to do presentations to the board of directors here at WVIA and I had to have honed those skills so that I could make a positive effect on the presentation or selling a concept of a project we wanted to take take on and and do. So, I am that perfect example of that kid in that class who said I will never ever need this? Why are they making me do this? I was so wrong and I think that those are the best two examples I can give. I use that stuff every day.
Alexandra: I love those examples Joe, love them.
Rebecca: I think it’s interesting and I feel like when you talk to someone that’s in their adult ages, we all say it. Like: I should have paid more attention to this. I’m a former Spanish teacher and I get it all the time. “Senorita, I should have paid attention because now I’m studying abroad.” Or you know I just think it’s really interesting. I think perspectives change obviously as you get older, so thank you for that, Joe. So we’re wondering when did you have this epiphany about wanting to do your job, or did you always want to be working at WVIA? Was there an aha moment for you?
Joe: I think there was, and I just recently learned they’re called “red bike moments.” And I’ve learned that from the Ken Burns documentary on Muhammad Ali. He was a champion boxer, and he had what he called his red bike moment or that epiphany moment and it was when, he had a brand new red bike and somebody stole it. And he went looking for the police and found an officer, a cop and he told him he wanted to whoop some kid who stole his bike. And that cop or that officer happened to be a boxing coach, and told him before you go out looking for a fight you’re got to learn how to fight. And so he told him if you show up at the gym here tomorrow, I will teach you how to fight. So Muhammad Ali showed up at that gym. He was Cassius Clay at the time, that was his original name, and he became a world champion boxer. So that was what he calls his red bike moment. For me, I had a cousin who was a guitar player who had an amplifier that had failed. The guitar amplifier didn’t work, and he didn’t want it anymore. So I asked if I could have it and I think I had to trade him a Woodstock 2 album to get it. But I got it, I took it home, and it didn’t work just like he said. And I was fortunate because the neighbor kid across the street’s father was a TV repairman. Those were guys who actually went around repairing televisions in people’s homes way back in the day when that was a thing and so he said we’ll take it apart and see if we can find out anything. So we took this amplifier apart and saw all these components inside that were all foreign to me. I never saw transistors or capacitors or resistors, and he said we’ll plug it in and we’ll see if we see anything. Sure enough we start seeing smoke come out of one of the components. And he said ok shut it off, shut it off. That’s a capacitor, I think my dad has some over the shop. He said I’ll be right back. He went home, got a component, same value and came back with a soldering iron, cut the component out, wired the other one in, soldered it up so that it was connected, turned it on and the amplifier worked. I only had a microphone, not a guitar, to connect to it, but I could talk into the microphone and we could hear it loud and that was my red bike moment. That’s when I knew that that feeling of fixing something and making it work when it wasn’t working before was when I knew that I wanted to work in the electronics Industry of some sort. And as it turns out my first job in electronics was in a radio shop, not broadcast radio. This was mobile radio, the type that police use for communications and taxi cab drivers back in the day, the dispatcher would call them on those radios. That’s where I first landed out of college, and then eventually I found my way into broadcasting which I love.
Rebecca: Yeah I always think it’s interesting too. Before meeting some of your colleagues at WVIA, I never realized how many different jobs fall under you know at WVIA broadcasting and different different capacities like that. So there’s a lot that you can do under that umbrella.
Joe: Indeed it’s limitless, but it’s limited by the amount of time you can put into it. So we can do a lot of things but like everybody else, we only have so many people and so much time and so much money. Cuz everything costs money to do.
Rebecca: So this is my favorite part of the podcast, we call it the Blast 5 when I’m gonna normally blast you with five questions, but today we’re only gonna ask you one question. But if you could blast us with 5 skills that you feel are important and needed for your industry, what would be those five skills?
Joe: I don’t know if you can’t really go to college or classes for these but there are five things that come to mind. The number one thing that I found most important in my job was troubleshooting. That’s the ability to look into a problem and determine where the problem is. We call it troubleshooting cuz you start shooting you know where something happens for example every electronic device tends to have an input, a processing area, and an output. You know and so if you can figure out what’s wrong, is it in the output? Is it in the input is the input there is something inside that is not working maybe? Analyzing would be another, you have to analyze the situation, particularly when you’re trying to do a new project you have to analyze what your needs are going to be. What’s this, what’s this new thing going to have to do? So I don’t know again. I don’t think that either troubleshooting or analyzing are things you could take courses in but they are to 2 things I would think are important. Planning is also very important. planning for me because I’m in a management position. We do long-term planning sometimes out 5 years…I have to figure out what’s going to be happening in five years and I think that another thing that I would mention is predicting because a lot of that is not really a skill necessarily, but it is a thing. The weather people do it all the time they predict the weather and by the way, they’re getting pretty good at it over the years, but I think predicting is another thing. And the final thing I would say that’s important, again I apologize, cuz none of these are things you can say take this class, but I would say is adapting because my industry like all is changing so awesome and so fast anymore at an accelerated pace. We’re looking at the next generation of television and it seems like just last week but it was ten years ago at least we did conversion from analog to digital. So, it’s going to have to be able to adapt because things will change constantly. And I will also throw in there since this is STEM is that I went to college, but I never stopped learning. I still learn every single day in my life. I am still reading books because things have changed everything I looked for the most part, that I learned about electronics in college other than the fundamentals has changed. I learned about vacuum tubes and when I started in this business everybody had vacuum tubes in their home and television and electronic devices and then it went to solid-state transistors and then it went to integrated circuits and large-scale integration and everything has changed, so you could not I would not be able to do my job if I just tried to go by on what I had learned in college, so you have to know that I think if you’re in the technology field it’s going to be a lifelong learning thing and it’s actually kind of fun because you never get bored ever.
Rebecca: I think those are great points and you know even if it’s not that specific class on the skills I think students can learn how these kinds of skills outside of a class right in every lesson we’re learning how to adapt and teachers if they’re listening to this podcast can start incorporating some of these skills within their lessons as well. I know many Educators already are leaning more towards analyzing and work like that is fantastic. I love all five of those. They are really good ones. Well Alexandra, Joe… Alexandra, do something else that you want to add?
Alexandra: I actually do so if we have folks that are interested in what you do and where you work and they want to learn more, Joe, do you have any websites they could go to any sources of information we can put in our show notes for folks?
Joe: Well certainly there’s an organization that I belong to in fact I was the chairman of the local chapter for a number of years, decades actually, called The Society of Broadcast Engineers. We have a national chapter out in Indianapolis. And so they can go to sbe.org. SBE stands for the Society of Broadcast Engineers and that is a group of professionals who work in the broadcast industry like me there’s a whole bunch of resources there including if you remember there’s student membership, membership levels well you could access access to a whole number of webinars and that you can watch to learn. It’s, so specifically for broadcasting that. Of course, if it’s just general electronics there are a number of resources. Most of your colleges in the local area have some sort of electronic courses. Penn State does, I know Johnson does, Luzerne County Community College does. I am sure that the University of Scranton has an electrical engineering program that’s fantastic lots of resources out there for stuff like that. One thing that was not available when I was a kid that I wish was available was Youtube. I have learned a lot, as I mentioned it’s a lifelong learning thing. You know to keep up I use a lot of YouTube videos to help me learn the IT stuff. When I went to college there was really no IT and I had to learn that on the fly so between reading books and watching some YouTube videos I learned some IT that way.
Rebecca: Yes, YouTube has become everyone’s best friend now. I know it helped me with my washer and dryer as well the other day.
Alexandra: So you learned how to fix your washer and dryer with YouTube too?
Rebecca: Yes!
Alexandra: I thought I was the only one.
Rebecca: Anyways, well Joe, Alexandra, this has been a blast no pun intended. We celebrate you and what you do everyday in STEM. Again, thank you for taking some time today to connect with us and our listeners. It has been a pleasure speaking with you and I hope we meet again soon.
Joe: Thank you.
Alexandra: Thank you, Joe.
We would like to thank you for blasting the airwaves with us today. If you like the show, please subscribe or leave a review. If you want to know more, check out www.iu17.org for further resources and show notes. If you’d like to learn more about NEPA STEM Ecosystem and the work we are doing in STEM and job pathways, please visit them at www.nepastem.org. As always, we want to thank you for what you do every single day. Remember, keep shining. We’ll be back next episode to provide you another educational solutions for all, as we continue to transform lives and communities through educational services.