i am gonna be gone wednesday, thursday, and friday this week due to my schools orientation happening right before CalTech’s WiSTEM (which i am indeed going to :3), both of which are on weekdays. thus, with the intake challenge pushed even further to this wednesday (marking a full week delay), i will need to spend some time getting our existing systems to a good place and helping my partners with whatever they need over today and tomorrow before im gone. that being said, we did very little locking in today (hence calling it the dawn) because we had both a speaker and a tour!!
Will Heltsley, former VP of Propulsion of SpaceX and an insanely knowledgable engineer, talked to us about different engineering concepts and some strategies for finding a stable job and a community of like-minded nerds that are fun to work beside. i asked a few questions about working with teams (because this program has shown me that it’ll be a very valuable skill to learn), especially since Will has done everything from working on a 3-person team to managing a group of 350 engineers. he was really helpful!!
we also got to tour another startup, Forge Atomics, and it was awesome to see the inner workings of a company that is just getting of the ground! they had a really cool concept and i loved their mission, which in talking to one of the co-founders (Rex the goat) i learned was one of the most important things in finding a team that is going to work well: your missions need to align. also i learned from both mentors that, unless you plan on doing something research heavy like quantum computing, you should NOT get a PhD. guess what i want to do!