[bright music] Hi, I'm Jim Barshinger.

I'm a transducer engineer at Sensor Networks Inc.

In short, I would say we make widgets here.

We make ultrasonic transducers, which are used for nondestructive testing that does inspection of components.

And we can evaluate to whether it's safe to use.

So an example is we send the ultrasound into a part.

And we're looking for a reflection.

So for instance, if there's a crack in the part, we send the sound in.

It hits the crack if it's there.

And it comes back to the transducer.

And we receive it in an instrument.

It's pretty widespread in oil and gas and aerospace.

Airframe, like Boeing-- those airframes get inspected, as well as the engines.

Another good example where we do a lot of work is for nuclear power inspection.

So as the plants age, they can develop cracks from thermal cycling.

They go in, and they inspect for these cracks with ultrasound.

The particular part that we focus on is what's called the transducer.

It's called the probe.

And it is the part that both generates the ultrasound and receives the ultrasound.

I got interested my senior year in college.

And just by happenstance at Penn State, there was a guy named Joe Rose there that was doing ultrasonic testing.

I didn't know ultrasound existed before.

And I did stay for grad school.

But I also did an internship at a local company that was doing ultrasound.

[electronic music] Most of our transducer engineers have a four-year degree in a mechanical engineering type of role or something that's mechanically focused.

We also have had some folks come out of the welding program, which also they have an NDT minor.

We have had some folks that started at the test level with a high-school education and worked their way up into a design engineer type of role.

A very important part for us is the computer-aided drafting.

That's really how the product goes from your head into a computer, ultimately onto paper, into machine code.

We design the product.

So that's really our main job, is doing product design.

Our engineers work a lot with the customers, what it needs to look like, what it needs to do.

But once those designs are completed, we have machinists here in the building that are actually fabricating parts.

[whirring] We have assembly people putting the product together.

So they take all of the individual small parts, maybe between 5 and 20 parts, and those get hand assembled.

So a lot of work under a microscope, soldering, gluing types of operations.

We have folks that do shipping and receiving.

We have folks that are doing sales and marketing functions, as well.

I've really always enjoyed the creativity of this job.

There's always a new thing to do, a new challenge, a new probe to design.

Yeah, it really has been a great career.

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