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I joined Honeywell (then known as AlliedSignal) in 1997, after working at NASA Johnson Space Center for nine years. I am a chemical engineer by training (BS University of Colorado, MS & PhD University of Notre Dame) and work primarily in the area of environmental issues - how to treat wastewater and how to purify air. I also work in the general area of process development. My official title is senior staff engineer. The most exciting part of my career is making things work. That includes everything from writing and debugging computer code to figuring out ways to make a purer chemical product to convincing a bunch of busy scientists and engineers to write papers for a conference proceedings volume. There is often a fair amount of frustration before things do work, so it's especially rewarding to find a solution to a formerly intractable problem. One of the biggest hurdles I faced was in the transition from high school to college. I attended what I would call a non-academic high school and had a very easy time of it; I never really learned to study because I didn't need to. My freshman year at CU provided a rude shock! A second hurdle arose many years later, after I finished graduate school. I had a difficult time finding a job, partly because of the economic situation in Houston (where I lived at the time) and partly because I didn't have a good grasp of how my versatile my skills and background were; I didn't realize that I could be useful to potential employers in different (sometimes unexpected) industries. This problem is certainly not unique to people working in science and technology; I believe that people in many fields now find themselves working in areas they would never have anticipated.
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