A David Sedaris Beginning
I’m on a double-decker bus nursing a lump on my head from the unfriendly ceiling and browsing a New Yorker article on my phone when I have the idea for this story. It’s been a month since we announced the closing of Argo AI, and I’ve been in Portugal for a week today.
The self-imposed isolation has been inviting, welcoming; a solitude I’ve not had in the last five years. This is a story about a lucky young man in a series of strange yet familiar situations. It’s the beginning of an account of the cutting edge of robots and lasers and globetrotting, but inside are tales known to engineers across the ages: visionary leaders, infuriating customers, nagging managers and slipping timelines.
“It works on my machine.”
“Turn it off and back on again.”
This is the story of a young man at the center of a multi-billion dollar company who joined early and was there through the end.
October 2017. I’m sitting at a high topped table in a well lit hallway of Georgia Tech’s biotechnology quad. I’m in my final semester of college, an electrical engineering student with four semesters of co-op and an internship under my belt. It’s the change of classes and familiar-but-unknown faces walk past in a dorky sort of dance. The sort of, “you and I have a nearly identical schedule and we’ve spent hours together taking turns watching each others belongings in the library but we’re both too awkward to remember names.”
There are no electrical engineering classes in this biotech building. My nearest class is on the other side of campus and is a day away, but the seat is comfortable. More important than the seat, there’s a ton of space to spread my crap and a coffee cart just close enough I can’t smell it, but I know it’ll always be there.
Change of class ends and I’m about to go back to my French homework when the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I’m being watched. Twitching up and around, the freshman standing behind me is nearly knocked into the floor-to-ceiling plate glass as I spastically orient myself. She’s one of those familiar faces. She says my name and the lightbulb goes off: she’s a member of the same club as me – the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. I’m 0% Hispanic, but being a final-semester senior, I’m the club’s Professional Development Chair responsible for developing members’ skills at landing a summer internship with whatever their “dream” company is. More often than not, most of the development came in the form of asking someone, “what exactly is your dream?”
We exchange pleasantries and she asks me, “can you show me how to apply for a job?” Next week is the career fair, so I figure she’s asking me for help with a particular role or industry. She clarifies no, I mean how do I navigate the website and upload a resume? The whole shebang.
Gulp.
Since my daily ritual of applying to jobs hadn’t been completed, we opened my interesting-jobs-4-matt.xls sheet and double clicked on three cells. The first hyperlink was to a “Harness Engineer I” job with Boeing, a new grad Electrical Engineer’s bread and butter.
We read the job description and cross-referenced the Day in the Life key points with my resume to make sure I was buzzword-y enough and hit send.
The next application was out there – a Fellowship application with a nonprofit. I’d been putting off sending this in until the last possible moment, and sure enough the deadline was fast approaching. The two of us discussed the importance of essays, laughed about how out of place an engineer would be at an education nonprofit, and then popped over the package to the program director.
The third app was an application to a startup. We navigated the website’s dozens of job postings past grandiose titles with nearly empty job descriptions until we scrolled to the end of the line. There lay every startup’s favorite job posting: ROCKSTAR.
This posting had even less information than all the rest. Inside was a simple, “think you’re a good fit? Apply now!”
I fired off the application in under a minute, then spent an hour or so repeating the exercise with the freshman. The point of going through this on my own applications was:
Lay the groundwork with a big company. In a few days it’s the career fair and you can tell the recruiters you’ve already applied. This dramatically increases your chances of jumping the line to an interview.
Engineers are not writers, but college is about getting out of your comfort zone, so why not apply to teach the youth?
If a dream is cool, give it a shot. Best case – you get a free trip at an onsite (free dinner.) Worst case – you practice your telephone communications skills flaming out spectacularly in the phone screen.
We wrapped up at around 6:00 PM on a Thursday, and when we finished I set out for a home cooked dinner of spicy peanut butter ramen noodles. By the time I woke up on Friday, I had an email requesting a phone screen with the startup, and three days later I was on a plane for the onsite.
I don’t remember the nonprofit I applied to, or the name of the freshman in the hallway, but that evening kicked off a journey with Argo AI. Five years later I’m sitting in a crowded conference room in Pittsburgh with my friends, watching a live stream saying the company is closing down. As we murmured about what’s going on and who’s going to start looking for jobs first, a (1) popped into my email inbox. It wasn’t a notice of termination, or a job offer – the offer came an hour later – but a notice from United Airlines that I had an expiring travel credit I needed to use before the end of the year.
So, here I am. Ruminating on the past, watching boats sail across the Douro, and wondering if I should look up the phrase, “head trauma” in Portuguese as the throbbing hasn’t really stopped and I’m coming to the end of this post. After I finish this shot of ginjinha maybe I’ll remember to stick to the lower level of the busses while I tool around this city.
