Meet the Engineer Who's Passion is Inspiring the Next Generation

I've been at Firefly for almost five years now. One of the things I really thought separated Firefly from everyone else was we're all centrally located around Austin. Our manufacturing site's just 30 minutes up the road so I can go see my parts if there's an issue and then when we're coming around to testing it I can be there for the testing and I can be fully involved in that process and that's something that Firefly has that's pretty unique compared to most of this industry. Outside of work I mentor a high school robotics team which a lot of my co-workers think I'm a little nuts for spending all this time at work and then going over and working with these students essentially even more engineering instead of just thinking my mind off it but for me it's really really rewarding to teach the next generation especially a lot of the engineering skills and a lot of what I've learned because this is the same program that I kind of was able to take advantage of back when I was in high school which is why I feel like I'm so committed to working with it. I mean I feel like the barrier to entry isn't too high. Once you get really involved with it the sky's the limit. They've figured out through essentially through iteration of this program how to really make it effective for the students. There are some ways it hasn't changed as much but in a lot of ways it's improved for the better and so this team is a community team so they draw from a few different schools around Austin and also support homeschooled students, schools that don't have their own team so it's this nice mix of a bunch of different schools and so I feel like that's a really really good way to spread how much support there is because there's not really any barrier to joining this team so if you're interested you can just join but for me I feel like it's most valuable for me to work with this community team. I'm Alex Kaplan and we're landing on the moon.