What I Do

If you’re here, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with my paper resume. The fact is, while I’ve done the best job I can making that document clear, concise, and communicative, I don’t believe the whole of any one person can be reduced to one sheet of paper (or even two sheets, three with a cover letter). And as good a tool as LinkedIn is, it still isn’t good at capturing entire stories or presenting a person as a whole. So here, I won’t bother trying to compress and minimize.

As I stated on my homepage, I’m a multidisciplinary professional. Working in coffee taught me to leverage machine time and put customer concerns first; working in video games taught me how to lead a team of smart, creative people to accomplish more than they could on their own; and working in engineering has taught me that knowing the right answer is less important than knowing who can help me figure it out. What follows is a little bit about how I’ve come to own these strengths.

Education

B.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

with minor in music, focusing on electroacoustic composition and oboe performance

Noteworthy Classwork

  • Two semesters of electromagnetic and one semester of sonic wave propagation in cavities and transmission lines, including interface interactions and antenna array behavior

    Notable skills: Transmission line calculation, impedance/load matching electrical system design, signal transmission optimization

  • One semester of analog signal processing with heavy emphasis on Fourier transformation and frequency-domain signal manipulation
    One semester of digital signal processing with heavy emphasis on MATLAB signal simulation and filtering
    One semester of independent study with Dr. Lippold Haken with primary emphasis on experimentation and sound design using generative techniques rooted in the EaganMatrix engine, developed specifically for the Haken Continuum

    Notable skills: MATLAB, radio frequency reception and transmission, signal processing and noise filtration

  • One semester building a physical device to play NES games using open source projects as the starting point for the back end.
    One semester building a personal safety device designed to allow for silent, safe video and audio recording in situations that may be dangerous to the wearer.

    Notable skills: Non-electrical hardware design, circuitboard layout and design, component compatibility requirements, failure mode analysis

  • Seven semesters’ worth of lab work in chemistry, physics (statics, dynamics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, and nuclear physics), and others.

    Notable skills: Clear report-writing, safe and sterile lab techniques, safe and effective use of electrical test equipment including multimeters, oscilloscopes, signal generators, and soldering with and without flux.

Noteworthy Extras

  • Founding member of the first Junior Enterprise in the USA
    Four semesters as a consultant, providing input on projects for local businesses
    Two semesters as webmaster, building organizational visibility and presence
    Two semesters as international relations officer, building relationships with several French, Swiss, and English Junior Enterprises
    One semester as a project manager, working with a vacuum-forming plastic manufacturer to document operation of a pre-owned tool with no documentation

  • Eight semesters as a choreographer, arranger, vocal technique peer coach, rehearsal leader, and merchandise coordinator.
    Two semesters as associate recording engineer and producer

  • Two semesters as a performer, playing various roles reflecting both privilege and oppression, leading and facilitating discussions with various diverse audiences about different social issues, ranging from sexual assault to environmental justice.
    One semester as a writer and short scene director, developing honest representations of the complex intersections of personal interests and desires and institutionally reinforced disadvantage.

I’ve always felt the relationship between math and music. To me, there was no deciding whether to pursue science or music in college; I found the courses that lay in the between. I learned about the history of electronic music, mimicking technique from decades past, while also learning the physics behind the tools of the trade and developing digital structures to accomplish the same and more.

Non-Engineering Work

Before college, I worked for a small rental business as a general contractor, working on renovation projects, minor plumbing and electrical repairs, carpet tear-out, and installation of vinyl and tile flooring. During and after college, I worked for multiple coffee shops running the gamut from working for an independent roaster to managing a Starbucks kiosk.

Through these experiences, I learned the power of an algorithm, usually in the form of a simple task set or a recipe, and how that power can be used in training. I also learned to leverage machine time for work that couldn’t be automated and to adjust priorities on the fly, which in turn made me better at foreseeing business needs and staying ahead of potential problems. In short, I learned to be both present and patient, to recognize the difference between a surprise hitch and a systematic issue.

My Creative History

I’ve done a great deal of creative work in several fields: music composition, VO scripting, voice acting, audio recording and mastering, sound effect generation, and even some visual asset creation. I’ve even been a guest on a podcast episode. But far and away, most of my creative work has been with two game studios.

YouMatter Studios

I worked with this studio for several months as an audio asset creator. We worked in a remote scrum setting, where I learned a lot about working with other creatives and establishing shared language to work towards a common goal. We were also a very young team with inexperienced leadership that, ultimately, led to the dissolution of the studio as a video game development studio and is now thriving as a general media company centered on inclusion. The project fizzling was my first brush with a very important lesson: effort isn’t wasted. I still learned new techniques and practiced collaborating with teammates whose skillsets didn’t align with mine, and I came away from that project with a better understanding of what professional collaboration can look like.

Evolving Blades Studios

Evolving Blades Studios originated as a passion project in three brothers’ garage, born from their desire to create a virtual reality video game. I didn’t enter the picture until much later, but in the first month I worked with them, the game made more progress than it had in the entire year prior. At that point, I was named studio manager and tasked with keeping development on pace without bringing in any new talent. I oversaw the team’s attendance at three different indie dev events, public presentations of two technical demos, and the dissolution of the studio following the unexpected death of our creative director. The year I led Evolving Blades taught me to attend to subtle differences, like those between kindness and gentleness or excitement and action, and mostly about how important it is to center humanity in every interaction, even in business.

Joshua Graham, Engineer

My first job as a career engineer saw me starting as a temp in the electrical test area of a circuitboard manufacturing company in June of 2018. Since then, I have weathered two corporate acquisitions, a run of five different bosses in two years, and proposed and implemented systemic improvements that help keep the place running. At least on overview, my best work with this company fits into three neat divisions.

Training and Competence Management

  • I took the existing training format, an entirely ad hoc and undefined system, and implemented a structure for building the competence and confidence of the trainee. This system was ultimately adopted throughout the engineering organization as a model for training.

  • I worked on a small team with a Master of Science Education to develop a course for teaching the process of training from an asset-first mindset.

  • In my movement through the company from test operator to integration engineer, I had to train several people to backfill the gap I left, and I have since become the primary trainer for the engineering group of which I am part.

  • In addition to being trained as an ISO9001 and ISO13485 auditor, I helped edit and write quality system level documents in my first year with the company, and I have since written at least a dozen revisions and edited several dozen more.

  • I learned VBA for Excel to extract useful data from forms with absurd layouts, and from there have used it to track my hours and tasks, write BOMs according to low-effort input data for new products, and even generate rough order of magnitude quotes based on minimal technical knowledge of either customer design or our internal processes.

  • Science communication is among my greatest strengths, and it shows in both my customer interactions and in the body of my written work. I've written two process engineering guides, installed three tools complete with IQ/OQ/PQ, and defined both content and style guides for the creation of future documents.

Documentation and Automation

Raw Engineering Work

  • I, with the help of a senior metrology engineer, performed the IQ/OQ process for an automated optical inspection (AOI) tool, then performed the same qualification processes for its sister automated optical rework (AOR) tool. I owned these two tools for a year while also acting as a CAM operator.

  • I developed a process flow that the shop had never used before to build parts that were nearly impossible to manufacture with a more traditional modality.

  • I have developed a rough time and cost modeling tool that lets non-technical sales people turn around budgetary or rough order of magnitude quotes with minimal input from engineering, keeping those engineering resources more available to the floor.

I was an engineer at MicroConnex from day one; I didn’t know that was the job I signed up for, but I wouldn’t have changed a thing. I started out running electrical tests and logging the results, then wrote a report generator for the results logs that we had that I didn’t know I had the latitude to change. Before long, I wrote a training plan for the three tools I was trained on and a general template that any process engineer could use to build a thoughtful training plan for their own cell. I then moved into the CAM department, where I learned the steps that make a sheet of copper-clad plastic into printed circuitboards and how to understand the troubles we would run into with manufacturing files.

By that time, I had a decent knowledge base of most of the shop, and the question arose whether to pursue a customer-facing engineering role or a process development and ownership role. I wound up deciding that the customer-facing work, often referred to as applications or integration engineering, appealed more to me because I love understanding how a part will be used and why each critical feature is critical. The game of matching customer requirements to build capabilities and the iterative dance of making each new prototype a bigger success than the previous are the most satisfying parts of the job, to me.

After implementing SAP in November of 2022, I was also the primary engineering contact for the Sales and Finance departments regarding times, costs, and bills of material. A basic understanding of BOMs was expected of me and my colleagues well before then, but by that time I was also suddenly one of two members of my department and the only one working full-time. I became the go-to SAP knowledge source for the entirety of the Engineering organization and eventually the primary liaison for Finance regarding high-variance manufacturing and, as referenced above, time and cost modeling outside of SAP.

Over the year that followed, I took the philosophy and knowledge I had been synthesizing and started making tools to train the engineers who followed me into the department. My joining of the applications team was very ad hoc and short of structure, and I knew that I wanted to blaze a trail through the thicket of engineering knowledge. I wanted others who followed to have an easier time than I did. That trailblazing and documentation led to me being able to train my juniors to perform the same quality of work I was achieving with months of experience instead of years. And the heart of my success wasn’t my technical expertise with Excel or in writing, but in my willingness to meet my colleagues where they are and in my ability to repeatedly recognize the right stakeholders with the simple question, “Who would want to know?”