Introduction
I am an engineer by training and passion, who likes to constantly take up new hobbies and challenges and pursue them unwaveringly till the “valley of despair”. Though there are indeed a few interests I am gladly dragging along the “slope of enlightenment”, but most do end up in the valley. A characteristical behavior of mine I am not particularly un-proud of, neither proud of. It’s just one of those believe-system things which in my case is – “if there is a genuine call from inside to do something, you should not not do it just because you think you will never be able to become an expert in it”. Anyways, sorry for digressing, also sorry for assuming you know what the Duninng-Kruger Effect is, if you don’t, the snip below should help.
I am passionate about the whole spectrum of technology, right from the obscure AI codes to obscurer jacket zippers. I am kind of a guy who likes to do his own plumbing and learn circuits by jolting the the heck out of every single device involved. I like to write complex codes to do simple things, hoping I would do them enough times that it will make my time to write the code worth it. I like to look at stars and pretend to understand how big this universe is. I like to read, listen and go to office in-person. I like to sing (preferably alone or in a manageable group of 2-5), capture moments in photos, seldomly write and relatively less seldomly run. I like the cultural differences of this world. I love my family and my country India and its imperfections (India’s imperfections not my family’s).
Undergraduation
I started engineering as a very mechanical-minded student and liked designing tangible components like brake-discs, wheel-hubs and suspension-knuckles (automotive was a big deal in my college) that have just the right amount of fat to keep the system moving and not break under the stress. I have also done some stereotypical mechanical tasks like frantically trying to remove a stuck screw, melting, cutting, grinding various metals, welding two rods together and not dating a girl for most part of my college. These things if done right, can actually produce something pretty satisfying, like the ATV shown below.
First job
After four years of designing cars, manipulating robotics and learning how to code, I took a job in a company which had nothing to do anything with these gruelingly acquired skills. My first job was in a petroleum company responsible for refining crude oil imported from one of the big players in middle-east to extract something usable like petrol, cooking gas or lubricants out of it.
I was in the cooking gas sub-unit of the business and was posted at one of the 78 cooking gas bottling plants of the country. In India cooking gas for a domestic household is delivered in a 14-liters metal cylinder which stores highly pressurized butane in liquid form, and the whole reason for such bottling plants to exist is to fill as many cylinders as possible during a day, month or year so that it can be given to people to who need it in exchange of money.
As you can imagine, monitoring the safety of a plant where about 3000 cylinders are filled with highly pressurized and highly inflammable gas while maintaining an optimal throughput require some serious engineers, and serious I was, but just not about filling cylinders with gases for rest of my youth. So why did I take the job in the first place you ask? Let me explain.
The simple reason why petroleum makes the world go round and can make some of the most powerful countries insecure is that we all need it, and a country that has 1.5 billion people breathing in it need it even more. So if you can strike a deal with an oil producing nation to sell you about a quintillion tonnes of oil per year, refine it, package it and sell it to a billion people, you have got yourself a real solid money-making idea. But the sheer gargantuanality of this task allows only one organization to undertake it and that is the Government of India. There are three public sector companies that operate directly under the GoI to circulate oil and petroleum products in the country, and mine of course was one of them – imagine what a waste of time it would have been if it wasn’t.
Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) has a hand on the nation’s pulse by controlling almost 30% of all this petroleum circus. Which makes it big, like incomprehensibly big. (I remember looking at an annul revenue presentation of the company and feeling fatigued trying to read the number of zeroes). Being big allowed it to be stable, being stable allowed it to be prestigious, and being all that made it extremely competitive. Very few undergrads got an opportunity to interview for it, let alone work for it. So when as one of the rare occurrences, it came to my campus for placements in 2018 to take its eligibility exam without actually divulging the day-to-day job role, (large public sector companies rarely have a crystal clear idea where they will put you in their vast ocean of operations. They induct talent throughout the nation and then place them across their various sub-units based on their needs) I had to give it my best shot, and best shot I gave. They liked it. In fact that year from my college, they only liked me.
I liked it too. Air was punched, hugs were made and jubilation was felt. It was an absolute euphoria till the end of my college and right till the second month in the company when I started to understand my daily job. The sense around the plant was less about understanding the engineering nitty-gritty of things but rather about handling the two dozen inline workers effectively so that we can get the max out of the system that is already placed. The biggest and most complicated engineering components were installed by external suppliers allowing us to only play with the tip of that ice berg and what was really left to us was the operational aspect of it. Which would have been fine by me if I hadn’t had a taste of understanding what a cutting edge tech can do. To give my self a chance to contribute to that I gave GRE and moved to Michigan after working for 13 months in BPCL.
Masters
I moved to United States of America in the August of 2019 to pursue my master’s in mechanical engineering with specialization in controls and mechatronics from University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. My brimming spirit to learn as much as I could clouded by pragmatism to keep the course load at a manageable level. So I took, 15 credits in my first semester (most students take 9) a 20 hours part-time job at the university dinning and research project with a professor just to make good relations. That semester gave me a good realization of what stress really means, I missed assignment deadlines, meals and sleep sometimes for days. I waded through the semester and pledged to keep my commitments to realistic levels, which I did.
I also got a teaching assistant role which waived my tuition for two semesters and gradually increasing familiarity with the country and its culture resulted in gradually decreasing stress and anxiety. Academics wise, those two years were exactly as I hoped for, filled with flurry of mechatronics projects touching wide variety of engineering concepts right from mechanical system dynamic modeling to machine learning.
I graduated in the May of 2021 and joined a company I had no clue existed till January of 2021.
Second first job
I am currently working in Connecticut, USA for Europe’s largest tech company called ASML. We make machines that allow chip manufacturers like Intel, TSMC, Samsung to manufacture chips, which in turn allow companies like Apple, Tesla, Sony to manufacture their devices. But the real twist is, ASML is the only company producing these machines. (So no ASML = no electronic chips = no 21st century). But the reason you have most likely not heard of ASML because let’s face it, you can’t buy its machine, or honestly, you don’t need it (at least directly) but the real reason is of course that is looks kind of boring. It is essentially a box with a size of a school bus on steroids (Image below). A cool article about ASML machines.
What happens inside this calm-looking box is literally defining the pace at which technology is growing and will grow. If you manage to teleport yourself inside the machine while it is working in its full glory, you will see one of the world’s most powerful and accurate light source beaming metal-melting laser onto a non-melting glass plate, that is held magically by a 100kg stage hung inverted on the ceiling moving at 110m/s2 acceleration producing forces well enough to move a building. You will most likely be fried by the laser or knocked on the head to coma by one of the moving parts, but what you will witness before that will satiate all of your technological wonder-witnessing quenches.
This synergy of a high-power laser with a couple of heavy moving stages combined with a dozen robots allows it to print circuits on a silicon wafer that are minuscule enough to accommodate about a 100 billion (that’s a ‘b’) transistors in about a cm2 area (I will give you some time to think how much a cm2 is, then how much a 100 billion is and how mind boggling it is to fit later into former). Naturally, to maintain that minuscuality these stages should move with an accuracy of about half a nanometer and this is where my team comes in.
We are called NXE RS NPI team which translates to NeXt generation Extreme ultraviolet Reticle Stage New Product Introduction team and are responsible for writing the control laws and implementing the controllers. Well in no way we claim to rewrite the whole control theory, we utilize the concepts on classical and modern control theory and apply it to our system. Since we are not just controls engineer but mechatronics engineers we very actively think about the actuator design, sensor design, hardware implementation and signal processing.
I always dreaded to be at an edge of the above Venn diagram as I thought it would take me too far from the opposite end and the world would stop making sense. So I decided to sit at the dead center, having an ability to look in any direction I want.
Hopefully, now you know me a bit more than you did at the time you were contemplating whether to read this page or not. Please feel free to reach out to me if you think you can suggest me a way to be useful to yourself or this world in any way. Or reach out to me just to say “hi” I would really like that too. Just be classy!
