This fall, I will be starting at SpaceX as an associate engineer on the Build Reliability team. When I arrive at Starbase, I want to hit the ground running, both technically and spiritually. The following are a list of objectives I will be using to orient myself during my first few months at SpaceX. They may change once I arrive, but as Dwight Eisenhower once said, “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
The objectives I have laid out for myself can be broken down into two broad categories: how I want to grow as an engineer, and how I would like to grow as a person. This growth won’t take place in isolation from SpaceX or from the BRE team, rather, my goal is for my personal growth to occur in symbiosis with my contribution to the Starship program.
How do I want to grow as an engineer?
This question can be approached on many different levels of abstraction, as engineering is a discipline that requires one to operate over a wide range of granularity. The high-level answer to this question is that I want to cultivate engineering mastery. I don’t believe that there is a magic bullet that will turn me into a great engineer overnight. However, if I continually spend time in an environment where I am both expected and enabled to perform at a high level, then I will certainly make huge strides in the direction of becoming the best engineer I can possibly be.
Develop my technical skills
My short-term goal is to reach a point where I can be handed any problem and be able to solve it. This will require the development of a generalized skillset. I have already made some progress on this front, with a cursory background in programming, CAD, fluid system design, and manufacturing. My weak areas are electronics, structural mechanics, and materials. I would like to fill in these weak areas.
During my time at SpaceX, if it falls within the needs of the program, I want to improve my understanding in the following areas:
PCB design
Firmware
Design of structural elements
Mass production/process flow
Manufacturing techniques
As I get exposed to more engineering principles, I expect my interests to shift; however, these five will give me a jumping-off point for me to explore the engineering discipline more deeply.
Understand the objectives of the Starship program
Another element of my desire to grow as an engineer is to deepen my understanding of Starship. There are many elements to this. First, there is the most immediate level: the technical problems the program is currently facing. I want to create a detailed mental map of the major pain points the program is facing, even if they don’t directly pertain to the project I am working on. To solve more problems, one can learn about more solutions, or learn about more problems. My plan is to do both. I will have some pieces of the puzzle, but I will need to find where they fit. Building a holistic understanding of the Starship program will give me the ability to prioritize, and it will allow me to seek out and communicate information more effectively.
The second aspect of understanding the Starship program entails understanding its implications. If Starship is successful, it will reduce the cost per kilogram of payload to orbit by two orders of magnitude. This will be an entirely new world, and it’s unlikely that the implications of this change have been fully explored. Through conversation, introspection, and the projects I complete, I want to think about what engineering on top of the Starship platform will look like in the future. I could see myself one day starting a company that uses Starship’s launch capability to build out an infrastructure network in deep space.
Understanding both the current impediments and future implications of the Starship program will allow me to deeply comprehend and prioritize its objectives and those of human spaceflight as a whole.
Meet people who are interested in interstellar propulsion
A passion project of mine has been to learn as much as I can about potential interstellar propulsion technologies. Given that SpaceX has a high density of talented and nerdy aerospace engineers, it would be a great place to meet fellow optimists who share this interest.
More generally, I want to meet people who are willing to teach me more about engineering. I want to both participate in and create an environment where knowledge and passion is shared. By interacting with people from across the company, my hope is to be a node that can increase the speed of information transfer across the SpaceX social graph.
How do I want to grow as a person while at SpaceX?
Given the intensity of the environment at Starbase, I believe that it could be a catalyst for immense personal growth. This is not a given, however. It will require focus, which will in turn require that I know how I want the environment to shape me. Given what I know now, here is what I would like to achieve on a personal level over the next few months:
Cultivate the ability to remain calm and coherent under stress
To be an effective individual, I need to be able to enter high-stress situations, break them apart, and digest them. The best way I have found to do this is to clearly articulate the different aspects of the situation in as much detail as possible. By putting a stressful situation into words, I calm myself and those around me down, allowing us to progress towards a solution. I want to continue to hone this ability through progressive overload—by immersing myself in increasingly stressful situations that I am capable of managing, my ability to think clearly under pressure will improve.
Explore the limits of how hard I can work
While I believe that it’s wise to maintain a healthy relationship with one’s work, I would like to explore the extremes of what I am capable of while I am young. This will help me to calibrate the scope of the challenges I take on later in life, and it will make it harder for me to underestimate myself. It will be easy to focus in Starbase, and the work I will be tasked with will be worthy of this level of effort.
Develop humility
During my college career, I worked for the most part as the project lead for the student group that I founded. To a large extent, I determined the direction of the group. At SpaceX, this will not be the case. Although I may have freedom in the way I choose to accomplish my objectives, the objectives themselves will most likely be somewhat predetermined. This will be an opportunity for me to learn how to contribute as an entry-level employee, and for me to experience what that is like. If one day I start my own company or become someone else’s boss, it is important for me to have gone through this so that I can understand and empathize with the experience of those working under me.
Build relationships with people different from those who I have interacted with before
I’ve come to understand that there are a wide variety of personality types at SpaceX, some of which I may not have encountered in the past. I want to relate and cooperate with many different kinds of people, because doing so may bring out new shades of myself, both as an engineer and as a human being.
With these goals in mind, I feel prepared to start my associateship this fall. SpaceX feels like a place where I can learn A TON while working on projects that are important for humanity, and personally meaningful to me.
Most of the lessons that you will learn are ones that you never planned or predicted to learn. Wishing you the very best as you embark upon this journey of self discovery and actualization. You will undoubtedly be one of the best additions to the SpaceX team. Godspeed!!
Collecting the technical problems of Starship will allow you to see what others might not see, and hence discovery of some sort.
EXCITING TIMES!!!!