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Optical Engineer

Paul McManamon
Optical Engineer, Exciting Technology LLC, USA

How do you spend a typical day?
I spend a lot of time on e-mail, interacting with people around the world. I spend more time than I like making PowerPoint charts to various briefings I have to give. I travel quite a bit to various meetings. The technical work I do right now tends to be at the vision level. I come up with potential ideas we can pursue and coerce people into working on making those ideas real.

What (if anything) would you change?
Eventually I'd like to get back to doing more detailed technical work, but otherwise I would not change anything.

What advice would you give to someone starting their career?
Network! Build a network of people who you know, and who know you. Whenever there is an area I don't understand I spend some time thinking about it and researching it, but my most effective method of figuring out the area is to e-mail, or talk to, the best person in the world in that area. In general I know him or her. That is a huge advantage.