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 Dr. Russell Caspe, Advanced Engineering Manager at Gentex Corporation in Lackawanna County. Of course, we have Alexandra Konsur-Grushinski, STEM Services Coordinator of NEIU 19 and current lead of NEPA STEM Ecosystem. Russell, 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. So, are you guys ready to BLaST the Airwaves?

Russell: Ready to go!

Alexandra: Absolutely!

Rebecca: So, Russell, why don’t we start by having you tell us a little bit about your role in industry.

Russell: So, thank you very much for the introduction. It’s a pleasure to be here. So my name, Russell Caspe; I’m the Advanced Engineering Manager at Gentex. So the easy way to think about that is I run the R&D Division (Research and Development) at our corporate headquarters in Carbondale. So, what we do is we’re not involved directly with production of helmets or personal protective equipment. What we’re doing is we are looking at the materials, the processes in order to make them better along the way. I interface with educational groups like this one, I interface with our customers, I interface with vendors all over the country and all over the world. I just had a conversation with a group down in Brazil, as a matter of fact.

Rebecca: That’s awesome.

Russell: So we do collaborations with any number of people, anyone who can make us do what we do better, more inexpensive, which is the fun way of saying cheaper, for more efficiently and at a lighter weight, because you can imagine, what Gentex does we’re making personal protective equipment for the head up, every ounce of weight is important. So, we try and keep the weight down as much as possible and that is where most of our research goes.

Rebecca: Wow. I love that global connection piece. That is so important. Even those working ties are. I have to ask, did you speak English or did you speak Portuguese?

Russell: I know about four words of Portuguese which is enough to find someone who speaks English, and I also know Obligado!, so that’s about it (laughs) Eu não falo Portuguese!

Rebecca: (laughs) I don’t even know what you said there.

Russell: I said I don’t speak Portuguese. (laugh)

Rebecca: There you go! Perfect!

Alexandra: So your work, Russell, is fascinating. Especially, you constantly have to keep in mind your costs. You constantly have to keep in mind your eventual clients which is heads and weight for that type of thing. So, I’m wondering if you could dig a little deeper into your role in this industry and describe maybe what your typical day would be like, if you have a typical day.

Russell: That’s a great caveat you put on the end there because the first thing I was going to say is that there’s no such thing as a typical day. Everything, I have a plan that usually is at the beginning of the day where I need to get four things done by the time I go home, and usually at about four o’clock, I’m only about halfway through one of them. So, (laughs) what that means is that going through the day, I sit down. I have my list of work that I want to get done. Now, most of that work generally turns into report writing which is the least fun part of my work. The fun part of my work is when that part gets blown up. When someone comes to my office and says: Hey Russell, we have a problem. We need your help fixing it. Or, I had a conversation with a customer, and this is what they really want. Again global connection. We had a conversation with a customer in Canada recently. And, my day got completely thrown off the rails. What we thought that they wanted was that they wanted a helmet with the highest level of protection we could give them. It turns out what they told us is that what they wanted was the lowest weight possible, cost is no object. So, all of the sudden I have to start balancing: ok, what can we do? We have this line of helmets. And we have helmets that are the highest protection level, but they are also then the heaviest. We have helmets that are the lightest, but then those are also going to be the most expensive, counter-intuitively. So then how do we go about finding, if you take price off the table, which is a huge consideration for people not in my position (laughs). In my position, I’m looking for performance versus weight. I like to say I’m a materials scientist by trade. I like to say that a dollar sign is just another material property. It goes along with Young’s Modulus: tensile strength, flexural strength, dollars. So, that’s a really good example of how my day gets blown up. That being said, there is some routine during the day. I’m in a highly technical position, so I’m always doing something to do with engineering or chemistry. Now, my personal expertise within materials science is on the chemistry side of things. So, there’s a lot that I have to do with chemical analysis, mechanical analysis, and various different analytical chemistry techniques. Not only performing them but also analyzing the data and then spinning out in a way that is digestible to my target audience. Now, my target audience might be a customer, whether that’s a police force or our government or a foreign government. Or but the customer might also be internal like our Quality Department. So, as a manager, what I’m doing quite a bit is I’m delegating out some of those tasks like: Hey, go run the FTIR, which is a piece of equipment that we use to identify unknowns. And, then I go and I sit down with my technician who is running the FTIR, and we go over the spectra that it spits out and we try and find out what that material is. So, what I do is I give my technician the instructions to run the FTIR to identify this unknown polymeric material, and he comes back with a spectra and we both look at it together and we try and determine…. We thought it was going to be polypropylene, but it turned out it’s actually polyester. And so I go and talk to my mechanical engineer and how does that affect the now the strength profile and are we still good using this material. And then as the manager my job is to take all of those different things and put them together into a report saying not only why we did what we did, how we did what we did, but what the implications are of those results. And that’s what a lot of my day turns into.

Rebecca: That sounds exciting to be honest. And I love how you pushed it to your main role is: What are the implications? A lot of times, we forget about that. It’s not just the how and the why, but as a result, this is what happens. Umm, Russell, you mentioned engineering, which is one of those STEM skills. What other STEM skills do you use in your position right now?

Russell: You know, I use a surprising amount of just basic mathematics. Trigonometry. By tenth grade Trigonometry, you sit in that class, and you think to yourself: When am I ever going to use this? I use it every day. If it wasn’t for SOHCAHTOA, I wouldn’t be able to do half the work I do. (laughs)

Rebecca: I’ve of… I remember SOHCAHTOA! Oh my gosh!

Alexandra: (laughs) I remember SOHCAHTOA too. My goodness, blast from the high school past!

Rebecca: Yes!

Russell: It’s great! That and the Law of Sines. I’m constantly trying to figure out angles, and trigonometry is the way to do it. And, I remember sitting in that class thinking: This is boring. And then, I use it every day. What’s another thing I did? So, in a little bit more advanced mathematics I was once sitting down with one of my teammates and we were trying to figure out how to predict what a gas spectrum would look like, and we sat in front of a whiteboard and we spent two hours going through integral calculus and trying to figure this out. Looking up calculus tables, and at the end of the day, after two hours in front of the whiteboard, we derived the equation of a line. So, we were very proud of that except for the fact that we realized that we’d actually wasted two hours. But, even having wasted two hours we still had a better understanding then of what we were doing, and we never had to derive the equation of a line ever again. I mentioned that my specialty as a materials scientist is in chemistry. I work with chemistry quite a bit as well. Just the other day I was doing a stoichiometry problem. And I don’t know if you remember that word from your eleventh-grade chemistry: balancing equations and trying to figure out, specifically, I was trying to figure out the content of lead in the final product. So, balancing those equations, figuring out where everything goes. Umm. It’s not something that we do often and as a result, whenever it happens it’s either me or one other guy who is my chemical engineer.

Rebecca: Wow! That is a lot! That is a lot and I love all of those concepts you brought up from the past.

Russell: Yeah (laughs). I have two kids. One in sixth grade and one in fourth grade and I’m telling them: yeah, all of this stuff that you are finding boring and struggling through, you’re going to use it no matter what you do.

Alexandra: I think that the science and math teachers that are listening to this podcast are definitely saying “hear, hear!” if they are listening to you right now.

Russell: (laughs)

Alexandra: So Russell, we heard about the different STEM skills you use in your position. We heard about your typical day which is frankly anything but typical. Can you help us talk about more of the different skills? So, we heard some of them, right? Some of them are math skills and some of them are science skills but, are there any other skills that you use every day that our students would learn in school. And those can be subject-specific or they can be soft skills or 21st-century skills that folks need to be successful in modern society.

Russell: In terms of soft skills, I think the most important skill that you can learn, and I know that schools are doing a good job of this is Communication. Every time a student has to give a report, they’re standing up in front of a class and they’re nervous and even just reading off a page monotone is great practice. It’s a skill. It’s not something that you are born with, you have to learn how to communicate properly. And even in a Science, Technology and Engineering field, communication is so important. I mentioned in the beginning the report writing. All the scientists, the most brilliant scientific work that you could possibly do, the most brilliant and most elegant, simple engineering solution you could possibly come up with means absolutely nothing if you can’t explain it to somebody. And more importantly, if you can’t explain it to someone who is not an engineer. It’s a skill. And the more practice that you get at that the better. And every time my kids are nervous about getting up in front of the class, I smile. Because I know it is just going to get easier for them as the years go by, and it’s just going to be to their benefit.

Alexandra: So, Russell, it sounds to me like you love this work. You love your job. Your enthusiasm and your joy really does come through in your explanation of what it is that you do. Can you share with us when you knew you wanted to be an engineer? When did that epiphany happen for you?

Russell: (laughs) My father is a civil engineer.

Alexandra: Ah! Runs in the family!

Russell: (laughs) Ah, yes. My father is a civil engineer. His brother is a civil engineer. His older brother is a civil engineer. The joke is in my family is that the men are either engineers or cops. And the women are either teachers or cops. So, (laughs) ummm it’s in my blood. There’s just something about the mathematics and the nature. I think my father knew that I was going to be an engineer and have a scientific mind when I was a little boy. You can’t see because this is a podcast but I’m wearing glasses. And, I’ve worn glasses since I was three years old. I just couldn’t see a darn thing. They got me glasses and I would break them all the time. And my mother couldn’t figure out why I was breaking the glasses until she caught me one day. I was taking one of the arms and I was bending it, and it would go back, and then I would bend it a little further and it would go back, and then I would bend it a little further and it would break. And she saw this look of surprise and joy on my face. And she goes and complains to my father like I can’t believe it! He broke his glasses. He did it on purpose. I watched him. And my father, the way that he tells the story is, he says that he kind of goes: Well, he was testing the material properties of the arms. He wanted to know just how far he could push it before they break. So, that’s when he knew. When I knew… well I don’t really know. I just kinda always liked chemistry, and I liked a more applied version of chemistry which is what materials science is. As much fun as it is being in the lab with bunsen burners and beakers mixing things, what I really enjoy is coming up with an end product that is actually a touchable, tangible thing. And that’s where the engineering comes in, so I’m more on the science side of engineering, definitely into the engineering side.

Alexandra: And your products help people. Right? The things that Gentex builds, that you help design, they help people. They protect people’s heads.

Russell: Oh absolutely! 100%. One of the things I love about my job is I know that I’m helping bring soldiers home. We make ballistic helmets where a soldier would not be coming home to see his family if our helmet wasn’t there. Every now and again we get a report from the field. Someone sends in a picture of their helmet that got hit with who knows what. And it’s got a picture of the guy smiling and his kid next to him saying: Thank you so much Gentex for building this helmet so that I could come home and hug my kid. And those really hit home. It’s something that I’m quite proud of.

Rebecca: I just got goosebumps. It’s a great story, and it goes back to implications: Why? What are we doing this for? Wow!

Alexandra: Who are we helping?

Rebecca: Yeah. Who are we helping? The bigger than me kind of question we always talk about with students. So Russell, you obviously didn’t, or maybe you did. You didn’t start in this position, right? What pathway did you take to get to where you are today and the role you have?

Russell: Oh how far back do you want to go? We can talk about starting undergraduate in college through grad school and then into industry if you want?

Rebecca: Perfect!

Russell: Alright so I started in Chemical Engineering. Because I said that what I wanted to do was become an engineer and I love chemistry. As it turns out, chemical engineering is more about engineering chemical facilities and how to handle chemicals properly. And that’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to engineer chemicals. And one of my roommates was in materials science. And I saw the work he was doing and I was like, yep. That’s it. That’s what I want to do. So I went and started to do that and my grades turned around. And then at the end of undergraduate, I was talking to one of my professors and this was back in 2003 so the economy wasn’t all that good. The job market wasn’t great and he just told me: You need to go to grad school. You’ll always regret never going to grad school, and so I shipped off to Seattle, the University of Washington. Oh, I graduated from undergrad from Rutgers in New Jersey. But, after that I went to the University of Washington in Seattle, and I was working on this great armor project. And unfortunately, the company who was funding my work, they went under. Usually, that’s a death knell for a graduate program. Thankfully, there was some money going back and forth between Congress and the UK Parliament trying to send students back and forth across the ocean and so I ended up at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom working on unique composites manufacturing process. I got my PhD. there, and I thought the job market in 2003 was bad, but I graduated in 2010. So, (laughs) I found any job that would have me which was working as a materials scientist for a company in aerospace back out in Seattle. We were a tier-one supplier of Boeing. And this was just pure engineering. We were building the lavatories for the new 787 and the new 737.

Rebecca: Wow.

Russell: So, if you’ve flown on a 737 recently and you’ve noticed the little curved walls. Sorry, that’s my fault. We took half an inch away from you inside the lavatory. But, every airline got 1.8 more seats on the airplane, so hey it was worth it to them. And around 2013, the economy was really starting to pick back up and I started to look for jobs back east because I wanted to move back home. I’m originally from northern New Jersey. And the Gentex opportunity popped up. It was right in my alleyway. It was an armor project which goes back into my University of Washington days. It had to do with composites because that’s what modern ballistic helmets are made of. They’re made out of advanced ballistic composite materials which is right up my alley from grad school. And it was close to home; it was great. And, man, just seeing what they do. And as I talked about earlier: bringing soldiers home. Bringing people home to see their families. It was just a great opportunity. I couldn’t pass it up. So, I moved out here to the Scranton area. I started working there as just a materials engineer. And then a couple of years later we started a group called the advanced engineering group and I got promoted to be the manager and that’s…

Rebecca: Congratulations!

Russell: That’s how I came to be where I am today. Thank you.

Rebecca: Oftentimes we get to start where we don’t envision ourselves starting. But, if you work hard that hard work pays off and look at where it brought you today. So that’s fantastic.

Russell: Yeah it wasn’t a very circuitous route. I kind of ended up where I always thought I would, which is a little bit strange if you think about it.

Rebecca: Well Russell, right now is my favorite part of our podcast on BLaST the Airwaves. Where I blast you with five random questions, and it might not have anything to do with career pathways. Just so our listeners get to know who you are. Okay?
Russell: Perfect.

Rebecca: So, there are going to be some fun questions. If you can just respond with a short answer, that would be fantastic. Are you ready for this?

Russell: Okay I think so.

Rebecca: So, Russell, what’s your favorite part of your job? You alluded to this a little bit.

Russell: You know, it’s not going to be what you think it is. I think my favorite part of the job, is when we are given a difficult task, I look at it and I think it’s impossible, and three months later I get it done.

Rebecca: That sounds intriguing. Three months later, I’m thinking: Oh five minutes later…

Russell: (laughs) No! Real-life takes a little longer.

Rebecca: Not so serious one now: Favorite food.

Russell: Oh man! No, that’s a more difficult question that you can possibly imagine. I love food. Okay so, my comfort food would be Mediterranean food. Anything all the way from Spain all the way out to Israel and Lebanon, paella, Italian food, all that good stuff.

Alexandra: I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.

Russell: (laughs)

Rebecca: Russell, Favorite music.

Russell: Grunge I’m a kid from the early 90s. Pearl Jam is my favorite band. I will admit that that was a non-zero reason why I accepted the position at the University of Washington.

Rebecca: Next one: Favorite TV show

Russell: Right now, I’m on a hiatus from watching The Expanse because I’m reading all the books. I would say all-time my favorite TV show was News Radio. It was a sitcom from the early 90s with Dave Foley and Phil Hartman. It was hilarious.

Alexandra: I remember that show, Rebecca!

Rebecca: And last one, if you were to give your ultimate piece of advice to our listeners, what would it be?

Russell: Stick with it. Whatever it is that you are doing. If it’s hard, that’s good. You’ll grow.

Rebecca: Love it. Love it, Russell. Well, Russell, it has been a blast, no pun intended, with you and Alexandra today. 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. And it was a pleasure to have you on the podcast, and for me meeting you. This was the first time I’ve met you so, it was a pleasure and take care. Hopefully, we will connect soon.

Alexandra: Thank you, Russell.

Russell: Thank you very much; it was my pleasure.

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.

Additional/Suggested resources mentioned in the episode:

Gentex Corporation

BLaST Intermediate Unit 17 – www.iu17.org 

Professional Learning Opportunities at BLaST IU 17 – https://www.iu17.org/professional-learning/ 

Website: https://www.nepastem.org

Facebook: NEPA STEM Ecosystem – @NEPASTEMecosystem

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Music in this podcast provided by Scott Holmes Music on Tribe of Noise Pro. 

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