Welcome to Your STEM Career

Dear nerds, welcome to your STEM career. Nice calculator. Remember all those touchy-feely classes college made you take? You’ll need those and your soft skills more than you think. Now, if you’re about to click away this article in horror, stay with me. You have already proven you’re trainable. You still need to read, listen, write, and speak…in public, even. Conversely, some of you may already have the gift for gab. Awesome. Lean into it. If you keep your technical skills fresh as you continuously improve your communication skills, I guarantee you’ll go far.

I’ve spent nearly 30 years as a civil engineer in consulting firms, half of which was concurrent with my Army and Reserve officer career. I progressed from designer to project manager to engineering department lead. Nowadays, I’m on the downhill side of my career bell curve doing QC, training, and working design standards. Before and along the way, I led soldiers from bridge building, blowing things up, and managing DOD facility projects in six states. My last Army role was “engineer guy” assigned to civil affairs teams running around the Afghanistan boondocks. Through all this civilian and military time, I had mentors that ranged from fantastic to embarrassing. I’ve mentored many engineers of varying levels of experience and expertise. I’ve worked with hundreds, hired scores, and even fired a few. For an escape, I now adjunct teach at our local university’s engineering classes.  

Most of my mentoring and teaching has very little to do with Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics. The vast majority is on communication. Yes, writing, speaking, and presenting are skills that even those of us physics ninjas need to know. Making connections with other humans, however possible, is key to communication.

First, the good news: you will get a lot of latitude. You will be the technical geek in nearly every conversation with laypeople. They don’t expect Oprah or Rogan. You can trip over a word here and there and dangle your participle. But you must communicate. Your development, career, dare I say the world, all depend on it. 

In recent years, during that fun germ phase, I read many articles written by people who should have the top row completely removed from their keyboard. They had no business publishing any article with numbers. Things like “…the cumulative number of cases continues to rise…” Of course it does, that is the very definition of cumulative, it will never go down. The world is in desperate need of humans who do not jump to conclusions, are wary of their own emotional decisions, and who analyze and think critically while weighing available data. Sound familiar? We need nerds, and vocal ones at that.

So, practice, practice, practice. People gravitate to tasks they enjoy and procrastinate tasks they don’t. If you don’t like writing, start by reading. I am convinced that reading helps me write better. Technical is best, but really reading anything with old-fashioned sentences, paragraphs, and chapters will help you write better. Nonfiction, fiction, anything you’re interested in will help flex those language synapses in your brain.

Put yourself in situations where you’ll have to speak to others, maybe even multiple others at a time. It’s ok, they won’t bite. If possible, just start by attending those events where you’ll spend most of your time listening. Like the reading/writing relationship, listening is tied to good speaking. I guarantee you good speaking will rub off. Martin Luther King Jr. was a phenomenal speaker. Listen to him and you might feel like you’re at a church sermon. Guess what he listened to, a lot, as a kid? Little Martin spent a lot of time in a church pew. So, ask your boss to tag along to meetings or projects. Ask to be included in online meetings even if they’re only adjacent to what you’re working on. 

But while in those settings, don’t just hear, but actually listen. It’s human nature to formulate your answer or response while others are still talking. It’s fight-or-flight. Our lizard brain readies us to be put on the spot and fight back with something smart sounding. 

Don’t do that. 

Listen. Soak it all in. Mentally chew on the words a bit before swallowing. Just like calculus, let those connections materialize between this new data to already-stored data in your head. If someone hits you with a question, just be honest and reply something like “I’m still processing all that information and my own notes about what was just said. Can I get back to you?” This is not high school, time is money. Generally, nobody is trying to embarrass anyone, especially the rookie. Snap decisions and responses are for the big dogs, people with “manager” or “senior” in their title. If anyone puts a rookie on the spot like that, they’re only making themselves look bad and wasting everyone’s time. Plus, every single meeting has someone who is just dying to talk…let them. Those Chatty Cathies are the Yin to our nerd Yang. Let them run cover for you.

If you don’t have time to read, then listen. Listen to good speakers, audiobooks, podcasts, Ted Talks, anything that weaves our language into phrases pleasing to ears. Any topic, just pick the good stuff. There is bad stuff out there, you’ll know it when you encounter it. Unless the topic is something you really want to hear, or you’re coaching someone, avoid listening to poor speakers or taking in poor writing. Your brain recycles what it sees and hears, so try to marinade yourself in only good work. Just like in athletics and the performing arts, do not replay those foul-ups in your head, just focus on the good stuff.

If your day job does not offer opportunities to improve your communication skills, go find them. Volunteer opportunities are nearly endless in every community. Toastmasters is terrific. Their whole purpose is to create better public speakers by hosting low-risk local, small club meetings.

Any active volunteer opportunities like coaching, refereeing, even pet shelters will put you in contact with other humans. They all generally have leadership meetings, regular written and spoken communication. Any outlet that puts you into a slightly different setting than your daily grind at CAD or spreadsheets will do wonders. As a bonus, you can usually find things that are fun! 

For instance, you might improve your skills by writing for an online veterans’ publication that does not judge your content, puts you in contact with other fantastic writers, and regularly posts fun articles from a myriad of topics from self-help to politics to resolving what-in-the-world-did-I-go-through in the war.

Writing well is fast becoming a lost art. An email or text is the fastest way to be misunderstood. So, write them well. When in doubt, bounce it off a peer, and encourage them to do the same. Even those at the top of our company org chart regularly circulate a note internally, first, before sending it out. “How does this sound?” or “How do you think they’ll take this?” are weekly questions. And then, if it’s important, follow up with a phone call. That is the ultimate “read receipt” to any email.

Even if speaking or writing is a legitimate struggle due to disability, in all human history, there has never been more ways to get your message out and acceptance for us. Look at Stephen Hawking, Helen Keller, even Elon Musk outed himself with Asperger’s Syndrome. For a time, we had a terrific young local TV meteorologist with a raging speech impediment. He kept at it. He got better over a couple years. As far as I’m concerned, he is the bravest person I have ever encountered in all media. If this kid could speak to thousands every night, I can surely speak in front of my corporate boardroom.

Find a way to get what you know out to others who need that information. “Putting yourself out there” can be terrifying to many of us STEMish introverts. But you can do it. Just try, it’s not high school or even college anymore. People, in professional settings, are generally professional. It was honestly a refreshing transition for me, years ago, and I bet it will be for you now.

You must communicate. The brightest engineer or scientist is nothing if they sit in their lab/cave and cannot relate to anyone else. You need to get your baseline data from someone else to get started. And you must relay what you discover, design, or build, to other humans. If you don’t, you’re basically a hermit…and not the fun Tolkien kind. Communicate well and I guarantee you will rise ahead of your peers.

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David is a father, husband, son, boss, writer, beekeeper, outdoorsman, occasional teacher, compulsive elk hunter, Afghanistan veteran, and living proof that anyone is trainable. He is a 1994 South Dakota School of Mines graduate. David spent 12 years in the Army and Army Reserve as an Engineer Officer before that career was cut short with Afghanistan injuries. He spent decades as a consulting civil engineer working in communities all around the American West and now oversees his firm’s engineering department. David continues to amaze both friend and foe being an engineer who can write a story.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.