Quote: (08-29-2011 12:01 AM)houston Wrote:
Quote: (08-19-2011 01:36 PM)Parlay44 Wrote:
If you want to do Engineering and travel try to look for field service positions. I've been all over the world fixing shit.
Past 5 years I've been to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Brazil and all over the US.
Get friendly with a recruiter/headhunter and they'll send you good job leads. They usually find you from Monster.com Careerbuilder.com ...etc.
Parlay44 - can you break down your job a little bit more? That's great if you can travel like that.
Sure man. Anything to help out.
My degree is a Bachelor of Science in Electronics Engineering Technology. I went to Devry. It's an accredited school. So it's an actual college degree not something you get from a basic "technical school".
I had 2 different jobs working with lasers.
First one was for a company that made 2 million dollar tools for the semiconductor industry. It was basically lasers and laser optics. The tools we built took about 4 months to complete from beginning to end. We had an optical alignment manual about as thick as a phone book.
The tools basically measured the thickness of the metal layers of semiconductors using an ultra-fast pulsed laser. So you needed to know about lasers, optics, electronics, circuit boards, loading firmware, using a voltmeter, oscilloscope and various other optical tools you've probably never heard of. It took me about 2 years to get fluent enough to be able to do one whole tool by myself without looking at the alignment manual. Very technical stuff. But fun if you're into stuff like that.
Every once in a while we'd get a report back from a company using one of our tools about a problem they couldn't understand. Now we had loac technicians in every county to try and maintain these tools. But sometimes someone from the factory(me) had to fly out and take a look.
So usually with 3 days notice I had to be on a plane to South Korea, japan or Taiwan.
If I couldn't get it working myself since I built that specific tool, I'd call home and work with one of the system scientists that designed it and we'd gather some data and logs from the computer on the tool and send them back to analyze.
My second job with lasers was for a small company of 20 people. it was a family owned business. They made lasers for laser welding and cutting metal and the smaller power ones were basically laser engravers for marking serial numbers into metal objects.
Much more basic than my first job so they hired me right away. I had that job figured out in a month. It was cake.
First week I was there they asked me if I would go do a field service call to Brazil. I said no problem. Flew out to a small factory just outside of Recife, Brazil. Campina Grande.
Basically I powered up the laser and aligned two mirrors. Measured the laser power output with a meter I had. Adjusted the focus of one lens. Calibrated the laser engraving software to align with the laser beam. Changed a water filter and I was out. 3 day job.
If you plan it right and you have some vacation time saved up, you can take a few extra days off while you're there and travel or hang out. The company paid for the flight both ways so you save a few thousand there. Not a bad way to see the world.
I almost got to go to Hawaii one time for a field service call. I was so pissed when they fixed it over the phone. LOL
