What I Do For a Living

It's been almost 3 months since I've started my job - and according to company policy, I have to prepare for my 3-month evaluation presentation. By now, I have a good enough grasp to describe what I do.

My company is a Taiwan-based manufacturing company, whose core competencies are in metal stamping and decoration and plastic injection molding for consumer electronics, from mobile phones to digital cameras. Recently, we have also been branching into the medical industry.

My office is based outside Chicago, where we work mainly with Motorola and their engineering locations. We sometimes get to see preliminary design ideas for their phones before anyone else does, and thus get to see the final design before they're released to market. This is definitely one of the most fun parts of my job - when I open up electronics blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo, and see projects that my office gets to work on. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten a chance to see any of my own yet since my projects aren't far along enough.

My job is actually focused on communication - communication between the US customer and the Chinese/Taiwanese engineers/staff. This is done primarily through email, so I would say 80% of my work is email, and the remaining 20% is reliant on the internet in some way, shape, or form.

So far, I've only had to go on 1 business trip - to visit a medical devices company out on the East coast. Another one is planned in the next month to visit a big mobile phones company in the Southeast part of the US. My boss and supervisor have to travel much much more, visiting cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Cupertino, and countries like China and Taiwan - sometimes weeks at a time.

Pretty crazy. This is a competitive business, but there's a lot of exciting stuff to see and learn. Fortunately, I'm along for the ride and only watching from the backseat.