Why I Traded a Hard Hat for a Lab Coat
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
- Theodore Roosevelt
I started my chemical engineering experience co-oping at a Coke Battery in Pittsburgh making raw materials for steel manufacturing. It was the kind of place where blue collar operators intersected with corporate engineers. A place of tension and true chemical engineering.
The role there is similar to many chemical engineers, you’re working at a 20-30 year old facility and you need to make it competitive for the current era of regulations and production demands. There I learned the alchemy of chemical engineering, the art of extracting every valuable chemical from coke oven gas, refining it to a pure product and making a profit from the waste streams. These products included benzene, toluene, wash oils, sulfur, ammonia salts, tar, pitch and so many other products of industry. I developed a unique ability to smell benzene, which is a sweet light almondly scent, much more preferrable to the scent of H2S (both not recommended to inhale).
My next role was in direct power generation as the lead engineer of a 60MW nameplate biomass power plant. This role was less alchemy, and more blue collar operations, the grunt work needed to keep a powerplant online, and given its location in California, it felt more like the wild wild west of engineering. I built valuable skills and earned valuable experiences walking the plant at 6 am, being on call, handling outages, and managing projects with real KPIs and deadlines with a consequence. Those are skills you cannot unlearn, and those are experiences that must be earned.
As an engineer in an existing plant though, your job is to optimize and maintain technology that has already been innovated on. There are opportunities to make improvements that have meaningful impact to the company, but real paradigm shift, a real step change is bounded.
To be the man in the arena, you must venture on your own. Build a technology from the ground up, work tirelessly to commercialize it and get it into the market to make a meaningful difference.
In chemical engineering, where I want to do this, this typically requires you to get into a laboratory with access to technologies that you could never afford on your own or fit into a garage. Real scientific and engineering breakthroughs require a level of rigor one can only find in a research lab or PhD program.
I yearned for that, and wanted to hit the ground running with the tools at my disposal to make a difference.
Also being at my job I would read research papers, stay interested in technology in the energy and chemicals space and felt that the professors that invented them, rarely had much success commercializing them. Most of the time these innovations die in the lab. And for good reason, it requires a young energetic person to go and bet their career on a technology and go through the slogs of the process to get it into the market, to get into the arena. That level of effort is too much for one professor to take on, while maintaining a full time faculty position. It is also too big of a risk for them to leave their position in pursuit of entrepreneurship, because at that time most have a family to provide for and require stability.
For me though, it was the risk I was willing to take. I was betting on myself, and my abilities to make something happen. I just needed to find a technology to put my effort behind and I found that with ammonia production and Andros Innovations. For now, the hard hat and steel toe boots are in a box in the closet. I will put it back on the day we commission the first plant.
Until then, the lab coat stays on.
Always be building.
