Engineering Week: Meet our Engineers Q&A with Emily Goldberg

In celebration of Engineering Week 2022, we’re hosting a Q&A series so you can get to know our Engineers. Meet Emily Goldberg, Mechanical Engineer at PAR Systems.

Q: What is your engineering discipline? / What type of engineer are you at PAR.

A: My degree is in mechanical engineering, with a specialty in control systems and mechatronics. At PAR, that translates to being a mechanical engineer who does some traditional mechanical work and some more process- and coding-oriented work.

Q: What do you enjoy the most about engineering at PAR?

A: The variety of projects and topics involved in each project. I like having a reason to learn a little bit about a lot of different systems and that happens on just about every project here.

Q: What has been your biggest challenge while an Engineer at PAR?

A: Well, that variety also means there’s a steep learning curve for every project. It took several months before I started feeling like I knew anything about what to do when given something new. Starting during COVID also meant it took longer to build a network of people to ask for support.

Q: What would you say has been your biggest engineering accomplishment that you are most proud of

A: For my intern project, I got to spend a straight three months building an application for error compensation on some of our machines. It came out well and I’m now getting to see it implemented in the field, so it’s been a great way of seeing something through start-to-finish.

Q: What has been your biggest learning moment as an engineer?

A: I honestly don’t think I have a single specific moment that I think of as highly significant; it’s more a series of everyday lessons that slowly accumulate into what we call “experience”. Epiphanies are far less common and I’d argue are far less important than the simple repetitions of the daily grind.

Q: Why did you decide to go into Engineering?

A: I was in ornithology but discovered that I really needed more life stability than academia generally provides; at the same time, my latest project involved troubleshooting a network of solar-powered radiotelemetry base stations, and that wound up being my favorite part of the job! I took it as a hint that the tech side of things might be a better fit for me.

Q: What advice would you give to a new employee just joining PAR as a new engineer? Or to a student looking to go into Engineering?

A: Any individual topic you know or don’t know is far less important than your ability to pick up new information on the fly. In engineering, and at PAR in particular, what you do is so specialized that you’ll learn something (or many things) from scratch on an ongoing basis. So brace yourself for the learning curve, but take reassurance from the fact that even if you never took a class on whatever you’re working on this week, you’ll probably still be fine.