SAM GATLEY, MANUFACTURING EVANGELIST

I OFTEN JOKE WITH the interns that one of the things that prepared me for this career the most was an interest in science fiction.

I’m Sam Gatley and I’m the deputy director of the Defense Division here at NJII [New Jersey Innovation Institute].

COMET is a public private partnership between NJIT [New Jersey Institute of Technology], NJII, and U.S. Army DEVCOM [Combat Capabilities Development Command], focused on operationalizing and advancing advanced manufacturing, workforce development, proving out some of the use cases for the machinery, and just kind of seeing how this new equipment can be utilized in the future.

One of the things that we built out here at Landing 360 is a design studio. We have all this amazing advanced manufacturing equipment, and we have a staff full of industrial designers.

And so people can come to us with a napkin sketch or they can come to us with fully baked print design files where they say, we know you have X, Y, and Z machine: go, please. We can also connect you to funding opportunities. The technology here covers just about all the different types of materials you might want to work with.

One of the other areas that we’re really kind of unique in, is additive manufactured electronics. We have a thousand-foot, Class 10,000 clean room. It has a whole host of additive manufactured electronic devices that can print substrates, conductive traces, pick-and-place components.

Some advice I’d give to the young engineers is to build out their portfolio. When I am hiring, I am somewhat interested in what you’ve majored in and what your GPA is and what school you go to, but it is not necessary, and it is far from sufficient.

I will never hire someone simply because of what school they went to, and they have a 4.0. And I will occasionally hire people that aren’t even in college if they have an amazing portfolio of examples of what they’ve built. I know personally, and I believe many of my peers are much more interested in hiring young engineers who can prove they can make something, than they can answer the questions that were provided to them in a textbook.

I’m not knocking that.

It’s a very important skill set to build out and especially for, you know, if you want to go work at NASA or SpaceX or something like that, you absolutely, of course, need to get the foundation down in an educational setting.

But for what we do here, I’m much more interested in how you can apply that knowledge into something tangible.