Last Tuesday (Oct 13th), day after the busiest Industrial Associate event I recall in my four years at the Institute, we (me, Ashley, Joe, Katelynn, and Daniel) had a pleasant lunch with dr. Eugene Arthurs.
We choose to have Korean food (no, it was actually me and Dan, not Joe, who proposed that) and invited him to join us at Sodam Restaurant.
As you might imagine, we did not give dr. Arthurs the chance to enjoy his meal in quiet, but we asked him a lot of questions and ended up having a conversation spanning the most diverse topics, from career advices to food, from how to lobby congress to the status of education in the United States. He was very nice and answered carefully and in length to everything, and to my great surprise at the end of the meal (almost two hours later) he was still willing to take questions.
We would like to share with you the things that resonated most with us:
Political insights
- SPIE, to fulfill his role of advocate for Optics and Photonics, needs to have a continuous presence in Congress. The way it achieves that is by hiring “lobbying companies”, which maintain Optics and Photonics in the radar of congressmen/congresswomen.
- Scientists and engineers are generally bad in dealing with politicians, and also in being politicians. Most likely that is because scientists are very fact based and hesitant to make firm declarations. Also scientists are sometimes seen as arrogant. Therefore, it is going to be important for scientists to learn how to be humble and try to understand the audience they are talking to and definitely to improve soft skills, such as public speaking. No good is going to come if there is a big divide between scientists and policymakers.
Career Advices
- Everyone has different needs. Somebody would prefer more job security, some others would be more motivated by going “all in” and starting their own company. The important thing is to “not put up with a job you do not like”. If you feel unhappy about your job, you really should change it.
- Work for a company with a management that really puts people at the first place. It is not always easy to find this information, as companies always claim that. You will need to ask around.
- In general publicly traded companies tends to implement short-term plans to boost their quarterly reports, in order not to damage their stock price. Sometimes this is implemented by closing business units (in other words by laying off people). Privately held companies are able to plan more in the long term. However, there are also plenty of well-managed publicly traded companies.
- CEO wants to hire people that are independent and do not need to be micromanaged. So, at an interview it is going to be important to show that you are one of these people.
- For those who want to change career path and maybe move to finance, or entrepreneurship, it is recommended to start reading specialized magazines in those topics, such as Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Bloomberg. If you find the articles boring and hard to read, chances are those fields will not make you happy.
- For future business people and entrepreneurs, it is going to be fundamental to look outside and reach out to people, colleagues, potential customers, friends, or even people you never met before. A great place to do that is during conferences. The advice is to not be scared to ask, because most of the people will actually be happy to help. Doing so can give valuable insights for improvement and can provide feedback for real-world, commercial implementations of your ideas.
As a last note, during the whole conversation we all felt his genuine support of students. So, we do know that at SPIE students are at the first place.
Ciao!
