By: Sydney Weiss Baldwin, Product Design Engineer for Apple, former Altieri Intern
In my 11 years since my first engineering job – a summer internship at Altieri – I’ve become a firm believer that every experience helps mold and propel you toward where you’re meant to be. Even if a job or experience wasn’t the right fit for me, I learned from that experience, and it shaped my journey to land me where I am today.
At Altieri, I received my first introduction to what it meant to be a mechanical engineer—an experience that was invaluable to my career! I learned a lot of valuable skills that let me know I was heading in the right direction. Namely, I got my first exposure to CAD (in this case, Revit) and immediately enjoyed the process of modeling shapes on the screen that represented tangible things in real life. It felt like a great combination of technical skills and visualization. I knew I wanted to do more of this.
Sophomore year of college, I landed a co-op job at Porex, a porous materials manufacturing company in Georgia. The experience helped shape my vision of ‘my ideal job,’ thanks to the rotational program. I was able to try out multiple different types of mechanical engineering jobs over the course of three separate semesters: R&D, Product Execution, and even Technical Sales . My favorite parts were the hands-on activities: testing materials and characterizing their properties, constructing prototypes, developing operator processes. So, I knew I should seek more of this.
The summer before my final year of college, I had an internship at a product design consulting firm called Function, and finally had that “aha!” moment. It was the perfect marriage of all the things I liked best about my previous work experiences: CAD modeling, hands-on testing and prototyping, creativity, and collaboration. I knew this was the field where I belonged.
After college, I went to work full time for a similar product design consulting firm called Kickr Design. I spent 3.5 years there learning a TON, designing and building over 100 products of widely varying subject matter, and making great connections with other super talented engineers and designers. I loved telling people what I did for work because they would always say: “wait… that’s a real job?! That sounds amazing!”
I closed my chapter at Kickr to move to a new city and see what the “large company” experience was all about. I had only worked at smaller companies before, so I wanted to try something new. Well, I succeeded in my mission by landing a job at one of the largest companies in the world: Apple! I’ve spent almost 3 years here so far and I’m loving it. It is so cool to be at the cutting edge of technology and be able to go really deep into mechanical engineering first principles to design parts, analyze failures, and solve problems. Designing products for mass production is a whole different ball game! And then after a ton of hard work, it’s so rewarding to see the products you work on being used and enjoyed all over the world.
I’m so grateful to have ended up where I am, thanks to all the past experiences that helped guide me toward my dream job. And I can’t wait to see what the years ahead have in store!