Dan Wolf

When you were a student, did you do anything outside of school to build skills or get knowledge that has helped your career?

Always! While I was an engineering student, I built small electronics projects on my own. These included a burglar alarm for my house, a spooky Halloween spider that played music with flashing eyes, and cutting printed circuit boards. I also bought a personal computer (Tandy TRS-80) and used it to balance my checkbook, automate the task of asking math problems for my two boys, "hacking" video games, and programming in general based on ideas from computer magazines. Personal computers were not so common back then (1974) and this allowed me to become more proficient at skills that were needed in industry. It also helped me to realize that I liked software programming better than hardware design. When I first graduated with my BS degree, I interviewed for a lab technician position at the local Community College. During the interview, in a huge burst of over-confidence, I stated that I would like to teach an electronics class (this was NOT something that I EVER planned or even thought about saying or doing). To my surprise, the interviewer said he “could make that happen” and I ended up teaching Digital Electronics in the evening. To say the least, I worked very hard that semester preparing lecture and lab assignments! Teaching evening classes allowed me to reinforce and learn new skills over the next 40 years. An example of the potential synergy: While working as an engineer in industry, I had to write 8085 assembler code for the first time and then decided to teach 8085 assembler in an evening college class. So during normal work hours, I was writing code while my off hours were spent deep-learning the theory. Each of the two efforts reinforced the other. And I have always been reading industry magazines and books related to my career. When I retired, I purchased a 3D printer and have been using it to construct mechanical components for various projects (automated teeth and eyes for Halloween). This required me to learn both the operation of the 3D printer as well as the Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. In summary, I have always worked on related "hobbies" outside of school/career and I feel strongly that it has always given me a distinct advantage. I do this because it is fun! If you follow your interests, your career will almost always be fun and rarely will it be “just a job”.