What's the Word? Eagle Alumni Spotlight: Benjamin Treece

Episode Transcript: 
[Music fades in]

Abigail:
Hello, everybody and welcome back to another episode of What's the Word Eagle Alumni Spotlights Podcast and today we are joined with Ben Treece. And Ben, why don't you give us a little bit of background about yourself?

Benjamin Treece:
Hi Abigail, thanks for having me. I, uh, went to Embry Riddle. I graduated in December of 2019. A very lucky time to graduate as it happens. I graduated with a bachelor's in aerospace engineering. And since then, I've had a few jobs. I worked as a design engineer for Belkin, and a test engineer for Sierra Space in Colorado. That was my most recent job, which I actually left recently. And I'm on the job hunt again.

Abigail:
Oh, okay. Very cool. And then do you have any favorite memories from your time at Embry Riddle?

Benjamin Treece:
Oh, yes. Okay, so well, you know, it's interesting. There's lots of good memories from classwork. But it really gets a lot more fun, as I'm sure you've noticed at the last few years, when you start to get bringing things together and you know, doing real work, of course, as pilots, pilots, you know, you get to fly the whole time. I don't know if you're in the diamonds yet, but those are sweet. For me, it was, it was an extracurricular research project that I led, where we used some of the schools Undergraduate Research Institute grant money to build these, these relatively small, hybrid rocket motors. And the favorite memory was definitely out in the test bunker down in the like, near the soccer field areas. And, you know, doing a preHy janky setup, trying to get these rockets to work in, and the first ignition failed, and I was like oh poo, and I was really just hyping myself up, none of these ignitions are going to work this this project is going to be scrapped. We're going to graduate; we're not going to have anything. But then it was the second one. And we, we do the ignition sequence, let it finish. And then a really weird sound starts reflecting off like the cars behind us. And I'm like talking to the safety, safety officer asking him what on earth is going on behind us. And he says that that is actually the rocket sound bouncing off the cars. And it was like, oh, holy smokes, it's working. And that was it. That was definitely the favorite memory was taking the engineering principles that I've learned over the last several years, and the tools, making functioning rocket hardware and actually getting, you know, like choke flow out of something that I built. That was sweet.

Abigail:
Oh, wow, that's awesome. And I'm sure it was very satisfying to see it all come together and be able to hear the noise the rocket made off of the cars.

Benjamin Treece:
I was like, there's no way this is working.

Abigail:
Oh, haha, well, I'm very glad to hear that it did work. And speaking of your previous jobs, do you have any favorite parts you'd like to share with us?

Benjamin Treece:
Oh, yeah, yeah, I can definitely speak to to the Sierra Space job, which is where I really got to use what I went to school for; that job, I was a mechanical test engineer for the Dream Chaser Spaceplane that they're working on that I think is is nearing completion they are they're hoping to launch soon. I wish them the best of luck on that. And my job was to do fluid hardware testing and anything that takes fluids, we're talking like coolant, the fluid of just the atmosphere, you know, the standard atmosphere inside the vehicle during launch of the propulsion system with its pressurized oxygen and, and fuel sources. I was in charge of testing all those things, given I had a team that I worked with, but that was very cool. And by some point in the year, you know, it's kind of a startup. So, they tend to give you a little bit more responsibility than someone like Lockheed Martin would because it's a startup, they're moving fast. They want to have as much time to like, just let people spin their wheels. And so very quickly, I got to get hands on hardware with the with the vehicles, which was just just wild. And it was like fourth day in go touch the spaceship, with gloves on, but still, go touch the spaceship, you know. By the end of it, you know, by the end of it, I was running a full test campaign on the fluid systems by myself and the propulsion system, oxygen specifically. And the coolest part of that, I think was just every day, you get to leave the building. And again, kind of that startup vibe, where it's like you're so empowered in so many ways. And there's there's kind of a weird mix of red tape and not red tape. But what it lets you do if you understood the system, you can get things done very fast. And so, it was always very fun to leave the building. At the end of the workday thinking back, okay, what did I come and how many problems did I have that I no longer have while I'm leaving and ge_ng that sense of accomplishment. You only get those on some days, but those are good days.

Abigail:
I can imagine so. And it sounds like there's a lot of math that goes into doing that?

Benjamin Treece:
You know, haha, there's not much math. Oh my gosh, I talk about this. How many mathematics professors are going to be watching this podcast?

Abigail:
Haha, you know, that's that's a good question.

Benjamin Treece:
I'm guessing that more in in other fields, we'll be doing more with math than I have. But I mean, I think I've used point, like, like Slope Intercept formula, I think was the most complex math that I actually had to remember from education. It's mostly it's mostly just just algebra. Because you need to go, you need to someone's already figured out a lot of the math that you have to use, you just have to go find the textbook or the research paper, where they figured this out, take that equation. The math is done, just plug and chug, except for when those equations are often really, really obtuse. You have to kind of so there is some use and doing the math to derive the equation yourself. You don't have to, it's very helpful, though, if you ever get stuck. That's, that's probably the hardest math I had to do.

Abigail:
Okay, so would you say there's more reading and writing involved in this?

Benjamin Treece:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's mostly reading and writing.

Abigail:
Ok, and now what kind of wriQng do you typically do?

Benjamin Treece:
So, I was thinking about that the bulk of the writing is, is notes, it is notes for myself, or notes for whoever's coming in and picking up the work that I leS off. You know, sometimes it's, you know, you've you've just finished a very long day, and you know, that you cannot remember what you need to remember right now, say, write it down for yourself tomorrow. Or alternatively, maybe you have a test campaign that is running 24 hours, and you need to get concise information to the next team that's coming in. So there's a lot of informal writing, but a lot of the rules that help you write well in formal writing help with that as well.

Abigail:
All right, and do you have a typical writing style that you rely on when note taking?

Benjamin Treece:
Let's see, mostly it is it is a bulleted list by subject, maybe put a time stamp on it, so that you can kind of remember when it is, and then you can look back at that and recreate a story. So you're almost, you're almost kind of leaving a breadcrumb trail of what you've done throughout the day. And then I also like to color code things, you know, it's like, red means it needs to get done. Green means it's done, but you know, keep remembering it. Yellow means that it's working on. And that can be helpful for the next group, because then you can say, oh, you know, I don't know pressurized system to 2500 psi, that's green. They know what's been done, they can go on to the next step. If you don't have a more formal way of tracing progress, which usually you do, but it's also usually a liHle bit harder to follow those systems. So, this kind of kind of helps you jump to the right section faster.

Abigail:
Right, right, kind of make things flow a little bit smoother.

Benjamin Treece:
But there's also plenty of formal writing.

Abigail:
Do you want to go a little bit into your formal writing that you do with us?

Benjamin Treece:
Yeah, yeah, totally totally, because I wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to sell Mangum short. He his stuff and stuff has been essential. It's a test plans and work instructions are the second large bulk. I mean, like I said, so when you're working on the production floor, actually getting hands on with the hardware, that's when you're kind of taking those quick, fast notes. But there's maybe for every, you know, week that you're getting hands on with the hardware, there's a month or more that you're prepping for that. And during that time, you're reading and writing test plans, work instructions and test reports. And let's see, I noticed what was one of the questions I wanted to touch on. It was it was the I think the differences between between school writing and work writing. Yes. I wanted to get into that because that is it made me think that was a good question. Yeah, yeah. So okay, obviously, it's, there's no grade on anything that I write in the workplace. But there kind of is almost like a democratic grade. It's, it's how many questions and how many problems arise by how unclear your work was your grade. The fewer questions, the fewer problems that happened, you know, you can kind of think of that as, as a well written product.

Abigail:
Okay, so in college terms, it would be a higher grade.

Benjamin Treece:
It is it is it's kind of a real-world grade of like, things that maybe don't matter as much. And you know, you see, it depends on depends on the reader. Some readers can interpret things very quickly, some readers need a liHle bit of extra information to digest something. But the biggest difference between my style of war writing and college and my style of writing now formally, has been conciseness and clarity. It's like reference page 37 for like diagram or something like that. You want to avoid that whenever possible, at least I want to avoid that whenever possible, because that means the reader has to sit there, you know, flip through the book. And there's I'm trying to remember what the term is there's a term for how worn down someone becomes by having to read and understand information. And when it comes to the skilled operators that you'll have, you need to avoid that as much as possible. It needs to be just here's the information on the same page. You don't have to go reference anything. Just A, B, C.

Abigail:
Oh. So, trying to make it as clear and concise as possible for your audience.

Benjamin Treece:
Yes, my temptation in college was more information more better, you know, hey, here's further reading. Here's a source for this, only the absolute minimum when it comes to things like work instructions, maybe a test report, you know, is a good place to put tons and tons of extra information. But when it comes to actually executing something in real time, you have to say, wait a second, someone isn't going to sit down in an office and read through this. They're going to be standing on a noisy production floor, trying to understand what they need to do next. Yeah, but then it's things like, you know, like parallelism, or like, how you introduce was introduced, insert, and interpret a figure, that stuff goes a long way to making that reading more digestible for the reader.

Abigail:
Oh, right, right. And that kind of leads me right into my next question for you. Is there anything you wish you would have known before leaving Embry Riddle?

Benjamin Treece
Yeah, yeah, I guess it was those concise and easy to work against work instructions that I think I struggled the most with. After getting out of school, I know that we definitely spent, we spent plenty of time doing that. It's just, I think we also spent a lot of time writing big, kind of like research style reports or like, proposals, and I'm sure that connects with a lot of different people's jobs. For mine, it was a little bit less of that. It was more my job has been more about writing, like I said, quickly, digestible information that can be worked against in real time. Although I do remember, there was this, there's this wonderful example, that I think Dr. Mangum had on one of the first days of technical writing class, and I'm trying to remember how extreme, how far how far to the extreme, he took the example. But it was, you know, he's got like, to my memory, he's got a big kind of like, turkey cooking pan, like, you know, like those, those aluminum ones. You know, he's got a bowl of cereal, a jug of milk, and a box of cereal. And he asked us to tell him how to, you know, build a breakfast out of these ingredients. And we say oh, first thing you do pour the cereal, and he just takes the cereal, and just dumps it into the the turkey cooking pan, you know, no bowl or anything. And we're like, oh, we were supposed to tell you to put the bowl there first. And he's like, Yep, I can only do what you tell me to do. And that really has stuck with me.

Abigail:
And I'm sure that that example, it can be very applicable to everyday kind of work, especially if you're working with like an engine or anything. One liHle slip up like that could be detrimental to the whole project.

Benjamin Treece:
You tell someone to install something. And then like five minutes later, you mentioned that you're supposed like lubricate the joint first.

*Sound Effect*

Benjamin Treece:
You've just destroyed hardware.

Abigail:
That's never good. Never a good thing.

Benjamin Treece:
No, no

Abigail:
And that leads me right into my last question for you. Do you have any advice for current Eagles?

Benjamin Treece:
Oh, boy, I think yeah, if I had to give advice it would be that that extracurriculars are where you really, I think get the value out of the the education that Embry Riddle offers. It offers great fundamentals in all of the engineering fields especially like the aerospace engineering program that I took, where you really get to just touch a little bit of everything, there's very little that you're going to see in the workplace, that at least you don't have an idea of how to begin to learn about it. Maybe you don't know the exact principle, but you can begin to understand it. But what I think makes the education really worth it beyond that is getting involved in as many extracurriculars as you can getting that kind of real, it's very close to real world experience. Those research projects like the URI program, or the capstone projects, this mostly I guess, applies to engineers. But I know that, like global security also has a lot of extracurriculars that they can get some real-world experience in. For pilots, I'm sure there are, so you guys, I guess. Yeah, flight instructor doing flight instruction, stuff like that. Yeah, the more the more of that, that you can do on the school's dime, the better because it is the most value by far. Getting to work with professionals and turning in a real product and getting to see the like, no part of the project is done for you. So, you kind of get to see all the nitty gritty. And the things that would normally be givens in a textbook are rarely givens in real life.

Abigail:
And that is wonderful advice. Thank you, Benjamin. And do you have anything else you'd like to say before we wrap this episode up?

Benjamin Treece:
Oh, well, yeah, definitely. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Abigail. Thanks, Dr. Mangum for reaching out to me. This has been a pleasure. It's really exciting to gonna look back on this time and talk about it.

Abigail:
I'm sure it has been very exciting, and we'd like to give a big thank you to Benjamin Treece one more time for being on our podcast today. We hope you liked this episode and stay tuned for more.

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Amelia Chesley:
This podcast is supported by the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. Abby Bradberry is our host. Matthew Haslam is our department chair. And I'm Amelia Chesley, assistant professor of Professional Writing. The intro and outro music is Wanderer by Aylex. Find us on YouTube or reach out if you're an alumni and would like to be featured in a future episode