 Mark Hawkins
Project Engineer
Caterpillar Incorporated
Peoria, IL
 |
 B.S. -
Electrical Engineering, Bradley University
M.S. -
Electrical Engineering, Bradley University |
 |
Supervising Engineer
of the display, monitoring, and communications hardware section
in the information products division. |
 |
"If you want to work
in hardware, find the best guy in hardware and become his
friend, so you can learn more. Same with software." |
 
"In terms of the types of people we need for our corporation, we need
people that are very good technically, that may not interact very well,
those sort of typical nerd engineers that go off and do things in a
closet. Those people are very important for technical advancements, but in
terms of taking what they do and adding a broader appeal to it and
utilizing those electrons, you need people that are very good
communicators and understand, maybe not all the details of it, but at a
level enough to take it out and make it useful to other people."
Mark Hawkins of Caterpillar, Incorporated, offers students some sound
advice. He speaks from experience, having done purely technical work as a
software engineer and as a hardware engineer and currently working in a
managerial capacity as a systems engineer. He tells students to find a
mentor. "If you want to work in hardware, find the best guy in hardware
and become his friend, so you can learn more. Same with software."
Hawkins further advises students to "take every class you can, no matter
what subject or topic, to broaden your experiences. And if you're going to
specialize in an area, then become the expert that you can [be]." As far
as non-technical course are concerned, he recommends that students take
typing, if they did not do so before college, because they will use it
constantly on "e-mails, documentation, software," and more. Other
important courses are "the ones engineers hate to take speech classes,
writing classes, punctuation because if you have a good idea and it
doesn't come across well, it doesn't go anywhere. And then [you need them]
for talking to people and being able to go to customers and discuss things
with them." In fact, Hawkins adds, "Even history and some of the
non-technical classes that allow you to understand other people's points
of view are useful."
Hawkins is acutely aware of the need to communicate well and understand
others.
"I work with the business unit, identifying at a high level what they
want. Typically, a marketing guy will say, `Well, we want this feature.'
and then I go to the technical people and say, `Can you do this feature?'"
Once the latter have worked out the details, he acts as liaison between
them, the suppliers, and the business unit. Not even engineers who work on
purely technical aspects of projects are exempt from having to work with
others. No one engineer does a job. Parts are completed by "the business
unit, the customer, hardware, software, components people. Everything we
do has, at least, three or four people involved.
Download Full Profile as PDF
|
|
