[00:00:00] Jack Carty: That’s one of the things I love about math and science in general, is you can look at a really complex problem and say, “Okay, this problem is too complicated to solve. How can I break it down into a series of smaller problems that I do know how to solve?”

[00:00:18] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe, and it’s my very great pleasure to welcome you all to The Demme Learning Show. I am so delighted to sit down and have this conversation today with a young man that I call my spare son. Jack Carty and my son Duncan have been friends since they were wee ones, little boys of five and six, about this big. Now they’re grown adults.

If you joined us several weeks ago for our second Career Connections conversation, I spoke with Duncan. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation with Jack today, because I’ve been fascinated with how Jack thinks, how he learns, and what he has accomplished in his career thus far. Let’s begin. Jack, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself?

[00:01:09] Jack: Hello. My name is Jack Carty. I’m a mechanical engineer. I love to learn. Like Gretchen said, she’s been almost my second mom, so I’m really excited for this.

[00:01:22] Gretchen: Yes. His mom and I used to joke back and forth that we would claim Jack on our taxes on the odd years and they would claim Duncan on their taxes on the even years. Their friendship has been precious and sweet, and it’s been fun to watch them grow to adulthood. Today, we want to talk about Jack’s love of learning and his interest in how things work ever since I can possibly remember. Jack, I know that you chose a career path based on your interests. Tell us all the way back at the beginning when you knew that you were looking to do something oriented in college towards how things work.

[00:02:07] Jack: When I was little, I was always bothering my parents, saying like, “How does this work? Why? What’s going on with this?” One of the stories I remember, my mom was trying to get me to be on time for school, and I was very infatuated with a puddle of water that had a little oil on it, so there was a rainbow-y reflection. I’m like, “Mom, look, there’s a rainbow. Why is there a rainbow?” My mom was not having it. She was like, “We’re late, get in the car. The rainbow is there because it’s there. Don’t worry about it. Figure it out later.” I always remember just– Nothing against her. We were late, and I love that, but I just wanted to figure out why things work. I’ve always just been curious.

Oh, in high school, I was taking all the science classes, the required classes. Took chemistry. I thought I really liked chemistry, and then when I was in 11th grade, I took a physics class, and I was like, “Hmm, there’s more than chemistry.” I took some high school engineering classes, and I always thought those were interesting as well. Then in college, when I had to pick my major, I took the intro engineering class, and I was like, “This is not as intriguing as the intro physics classes.” I picked physics, figuring it would be easier to go from physics to engineering than engineering to physics. I don’t know why I decided that, but that was what I decided. I got my degree in physics, and I wound up as a mechanical engineer anyhow.

[00:03:49] Gretchen: [laughs] You and I both have in common that we’re graduates of UMBC in Baltimore. I love the fact that your college pursuits didn’t take you too terribly far from home, but you and I also share the privilege of being able to work from home most of the time. Tell me, Jack, what did you find so intriguing about physics that made it more fascinating than chemistry?

[00:04:17] Jack: With physics, at the entry level, it tells you more immediately about what’s going on with the world. Once you get a little bit better of a grasp on chemistry, you can look at the chemical compositions of things and say, “Oh, that’s what’s going on. That’s why tape acts the way it does. That’s why super glue does that.” That takes a lot more comprehension and a lot further getting into the subject than just looking at, “Oh, this is the equation for the motion of a football. I throw the football, and it’s going to go in a ballistic arc. It’s just immediate, this is how the world works. This is using math to understand what’s going on around me.

[00:04:57] Gretchen: Have you always been a good math student? I don’t even know the answer to this question. Did you take a lot of math courses in high school?

[00:05:06] Jack: I was good at math, but I was always afraid of calculus in high school because– I wasn’t particularly what you would call a good student. I loved to learn, but all of the kids in my class were like, “AP Calc is so, so hard,” and I was like, “Ah, that’s scary.” I let myself get really intimidated by it, and I never took Calculus. I took every other math class in my school but Calculus. Then I went to college and I took a Calculus class, and I wound up absolutely loving the subject.

[00:05:45] Gretchen: I think I remember Duncan saying the same thing. He didn’t anticipate enjoying it as much as he did, but he found the puzzle-like quality of it to be very intriguing and to be able to figure out how to solve something, almost like in a– How was it he described it? To sort the– I don’t want to say factors because that’s a math term, but to be able to sort the elements until you figured out what the clear path was forward to an answer. I think that’s fascinating.

[00:06:22] Jack: That’s one of the things I love about math and science in general, is you can look at a really complex problem and say, “Okay, this problem’s too complicated to solve. How can I break it down into a series of smaller problems that I do know how to solve?”

[00:06:36] Gretchen: That’s interesting, Jack. When you chose to go major in physics in college, was there a particular professor that you found to be a mentor or someone that you felt really helped guide you to the path you’re on now?

[00:06:53] Jack: There were two professors that I was decently close with. The main professor I had, his name was Dr. Worchesky. I had him for– I’m going to say, like five classes. He taught a class that was really the weed-out class for the physics majors. It was Waves and Vibrations, and it was where the engineering majors no longer had to take the class. It was like, “Okay, so this class is just applied differential equations.” It’s like, here’s the classical wave formula. Figure stuff out.”

I really liked his classes, and I actually wound up taking some higher-level studies with him. Then the other teacher that I really liked was a computational physics professor named Dr. Rocha Lima who I wound up working under for a year before I got a call to go back to my engineering that they needed me again at my engineering internship.

[00:08:01] Gretchen: Tell me a little bit about– What did you say that class was, computational physics?

[00:08:07] Jack: Yes.

[00:08:08] Gretchen: How is that different from general physics for someone who only understands physics in Newton’s laws of motion?

[00:08:17] Jack: It’s been a while, and there’s specific math words that I’m not 100% certain on, so I’m not going to say with certainty. There’s some math problems that we’ve definitively solved. It’s analytical. We have analytical solutions to these math problems. We’re like, “Okay, the math is complicated, but we can solve it and get an equation that’s right.” Some things are a little more complicated than that.

Instead of solving an analytical solution, we know that if we just make the computer do a lot of math and a lot of numbers, we can get something that approaches the analytical solution, which is– Forget the name of the movie, but there’s a movie about the women that were doing the computations for NASA for going to the moon.

[00:09:05] Gretchen: Hidden figures?

[00:09:06] Jack: Hidden figures, yes. They were doing computational math by hand. It’s a really good movie. That is just doing the same thing they were doing, but instead of having to have a whole room full of people, you just write some code to do it.

[00:09:26] Gretchen: How much of code writing was involved in your getting your degree? I didn’t really think about that, but there probably was more than I would anticipate.

[00:09:37] Jack: For a physics degree, in my experience, writing code tends to fall more on the laboratory side. You have the analytical, pure theory, and then you have the experimental side. You’d have to take lab classes. When you take a lab class, you take data, and then you have to take that data and you have to plot it, and you have to say how close is it to my actual value, like to my expected value. Does the data mean anything? It wasn’t the most advanced coding, it was just some basic Python, but it was a skill that I wound up learning of like how do I take this data, and what does it mean.

[00:10:29] Gretchen: Did you have to take a class to learn Python, or was it learn as you go?

[00:10:34] Jack: That was the computational class, but there was a good bit of learn as you go. Some of my professors were like, “Hey, I had to learn this over the winter break. Here’s the resources that I used to learn it. Figure it out.”

[00:10:51] Gretchen: You had to have a degree then of individual initiative to be able to get where you wanted to be. I know you were doing this in the middle of COVID to boot, so you were a little bit on your own in that process, were you not?

[00:11:08] Jack: Yes and no. The professors were good that if you asked them questions, they would do their best to help you. One of the things I’ve learned about school is school really isn’t about teaching you something as much as it’s about teaching you how to think and approach problems the way that you’re supposed to approach them in your career. That was one of the things that I really felt like I gained from my program, like, “Hey, here’s a set of tools. Go figure out how to use those tools. Look it up, read about it, mess with it.” That was just a general set of skills that I think have been very useful.

[00:11:47] Gretchen: Jack, how is college classes different from your high school experiences? Because in high school, somebody meets out for you exactly the expectations and the deadlines and all of those things. You have a lot more latitude in college to deliver on the promise of an expectation in a classroom. How did that change for you? Was that easier or harder?

[00:12:16] Jack: A little bit of both. Honestly, I think the hardest part for me about college was learning time management, which is a skill that I’m still learning because in high school, you go, you start your day, you have eight hours of just day. Then, ideally, you do homework. You should do homework. It’s there for a reason. I learned that the hard way. Then in college, you go to a class, and then you might have like a four-hour break, and then there’s another hour-long class, stuff along those lines.

You might have days in some cases where you don’t have classes in the middle of the week, and you have to really build– It took a bit of learning to build that, like just because I don’t have class today doesn’t mean I can’t do nothing. I have to still figure stuff out. Some of my college homework might have only been four questions a week, but it still took me all week to work on it.

[00:13:18] Gretchen: Knowing that you have that latitude, particularly because you and I both have attention deficit disorder, that becomes even more complicated when we’re trying to plan our time, because sometimes we don’t measure time in the same way that people without attention deficit disorder do?

[00:13:36] Jack: Yes. The executive function of attention deficit disorder was really quite the hardest part. You have to actually stay on top of getting your stuff done. Just because you can do the homework assignment two hours before it’s due doesn’t mean you’re going to absorb the information as well as if you spend four hours spread out over four days.

[00:14:00] Gretchen: I think there’s probably a lot of parents in the audience who are going to appreciate your saying that because, sometimes we wait till the last minute because there’s always something more fun available to us, but being able to spread it out so we can absorb it, that’s a huge difference. Tell me how now in your work life, it’s different than college. Is it more like high school in that there are expectations guiding you, or is there more latitude in that you get to determine your workflow and your deadlines?

[00:14:35] Jack: Originally, there was more latitude, but I don’t really– I tend to struggle with that latitude. I really tend to struggle if I’m setting my own deadlines. I actually worked with my supervisor, and I said, “Hey, I know you like the work that I do, but for me, I need more firm deadlines. Even if there are arbitrary deadlines, I’m not trying to ask you to micromanage me, but I need you to say, ‘Hey, I need this done by this date.’ If you just say, ‘I need this done, I’ll spend forever trying to make it whatever I think is perfect. That’s not good enough for industry. You need to hand it off to someone. They’ll give you feedback and comments and say, ‘I want you to change this.’ It’s not going to be perfect on the first try, but you’ve got to get it as close as you can.”

That’s the thing that I think is really different, because I know I tend to spend too much time trying to get something to be perfect, and that’s a bit of the enemy of perfection.

[00:15:38] Gretchen: That’s interesting that you would say that, Jack. I would think as the youngest child, perfectionism wouldn’t be part of your DNA. If I’m understanding you correctly, it is in a work environment. How is that different?

[00:15:54] Jack: I hold myself to a very high standard for the quality of work that I do. That’s good and bad. One of the things I’ve learned is part of being on a team is doing– You have to accept your teammates are going to help you tell you what’s good. That brings it back around to the learning aspect of you have to learn about what needs to get done, and you’re never really done learning. Every time you go into a different industry or a different role, what’s expected of you is going to change a little bit. The only way to know if you’re doing it right is to get feedback from others. That’s something I’m still working on doing.

[00:16:38] Gretchen: It sounds like you, though, are very conscious of that, and so that makes a tremendous amount of difference. Jack, how much of the college degree that you obtained is actually applicable to what you’re doing now in your work environment?

[00:16:54] Jack: Almost none.

[00:16:55] Gretchen: Almost none. How does that feel?

[00:16:58] Jack: Not the best. Currently, we’re doing a project that’s not my favorite, and I’m looking at new jobs. Another project that is coming down the pipeline is going to be more applicable to my college degree of testing and doing an analysis on, like, if I do this, what result will happen? It’s one of those things that’s more– Computationally, there’s no analytical solution to this problem. We have to go and we’re– We got a big I-beam in the warehouse and we’re going to clamp stuff onto it and bolt it on and measure the force. I’m looking forward to that. Right now, what I’m doing, it feels like it’s a little bit of busy work to get the bills paid, and it’s a part of life, and it’s not fun.

[00:17:55] Gretchen: That’s probably one of the most painful lessons of adulthood, is recognizing that there’s a lot of things you’ll do that aren’t really fun, but they’re necessary to get the job done. Where do you see yourself down the road? Do you see yourself going further into the career of physics to stepping out of engineering and back toward physics, or are you going to stay in the– Will you stay a mech engineer or will you go a different direction still?

[00:18:24] Jack: Right now, I’m opening myself to changes. I’ve got a couple of potential things that I want to do. I would like to go back into research at some point, but I’m trying to get my company to pay for a master’s degree because I don’t want to pay for it myself because they’re expensive.

[00:18:45] Gretchen: Sure. Would you get a master’s in physics or would you get a master’s in a related field?

[00:18:52] Jack: Probably material science or data analytics is what I’m looking at.

[00:18:56] Gretchen: Okay. I understand data analytics. That’s taking data and doing analysis in a variety of different ways to look for patterns and reproducible results. What’s the former thing that you said?

[00:19:14] Jack: Material science is looking at the chemistry of things– Not just the chemistry, but the short answer is it’s how different materials react to different stimuli and if I have a– This metal alloy when I push on it this way it’s going to bend that much or– I don’t have a precise definition in my head but material science seems to be like the closest thing that is interesting to what I want to do. I’m sorry.

[00:19:45] Gretchen: No. It sounds like that is more experimentation-oriented. That fits with your childhood curiosity of how does this work, right?

[00:19:56] Jack: Yes, I very much found myself in my degree, of liking the experimental and laboratory side of physics more than necessarily the classroom. The classroom was interesting, but the lab classes were like, “Okay, so what do all of these equations mean in the real world? This model is great, but how do we apply it to things?” That’s how I wound up as an engineer instead of working just in physics, because I like looking at how the model applies to the real world.

[00:20:33] Gretchen: That’s pretty interesting, Jack. A lot of kids don’t know where they go beyond an idea. You took an idea and then figured out how to make it applicable to the real world. Jack, in these closing minutes, what would you say to a student who loves math, sees themselves in the things that you have described? Where would you tell them is the best investment of their time in high school before they get to college?

[00:21:03] Jack: Really get your basic math skills down. Just keep trying. Don’t give up. Stay curious, really. If you’re curious about something, learn about it. The teacher will always tell you Wikipedia is not a good source. It’s not a good final source, but it’s a good first source. If you’re curious about something, read its Wikipedia page. Keep learning. Never give up on learning. I think that’s the best way that you can get to where I am.

[00:21:30] Gretchen: I like the fact that you said never give up on learning because our whole goal here as a company is to build lifelong learners, but that looks different for everyone. Tell me what the best things have been being a young adult, having your own career path. Tell me what would be encouraging words that you would say to a student who’s just slogging their way through college, going, “I don’t know if I want to do this. Adulting seems really hard.”

[00:22:02] Jack: I guess tell them, “Yes, it is hard, but you’ve got as far as you have, giving up would be a waste of all the time and effort that you’ve already put into it. Cool things can come out of college, even if it’s just learning for the sake of learning. One of the things I’ve learned with being an adult is no one has any idea what they’re doing. Everyone is just faking it. Just keep faking it. I’ve gotten as far in my life with no idea what’s going on and just pretending like I have a clue. If you’re with a good team of people, when you’re faking and it isn’t working out, they’ll be like, “Hey, what if we try faking it that way?” Then you go, “Okay, readjusting, going that way.”

[00:22:46] Gretchen: [laughs] Jack, I want to say thank you for the time that you’ve spent with me today. This was really tremendous. I appreciate it. I love the way you think. It always is fascinating to me, the things that you say, because I’m always amazed at the depth of wisdom that you can produce. I just want to say thank you for the time today. This was pretty extraordinary. I wish you luck and success in your journeys, and I hope that perhaps you’ll come back someday and let us know how that five-year pursuit turns out.



[00:23:21] Voice-Over: Thanks again for joining us. We’re glad to be a part of your educational community. You can help us grow our community even more by rating, reviewing, and subscribing to the show wherever you may be hearing this. Don’t forget that you can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show, or on our YouTube channel. We’ll see you again next time. Until then, keep building strong foundations for lifelong learning.