Surya Kher – Early Career Mechanical Engineer

1. The first no
2. Dogged Persistence
   • The right path forward
   • Research
   • Annoyed by not building anything
   • DanV1
3. Learning the first principles
4. A solid start – vacuum; small mistakes; actually getting hands-on; blazing through the endplate design using first principles
5. Broken fittings and first failure – Voluntarily working 70+ hours
6. The first principles success story
7. The slow crash and burn
8. Slippery slope- how mistakes happen
9. The fear of getting fired
   

The Road

The No

Sometimes taking a shot in the dark can be fruitful, not in my case, though. I ran into what seemed like the goal of my life while trying to find a true purpose for my engineering degree. I was fresh off an internship where I was doing work that didn’t excite me one bit, having thoroughly wasted my first few years of college performing managerial roles.

After spending days trying to find some motivation, I finally stumbled upon a venture that would genuinely get me excited. It happened, and I was hooked. I applied without hesitation or any relevant experience, and got shot down pretty quickly. Rejection is a common thing, and I would usually move on to another job application without a second thought; this time was different.

I won’t go into the nitty-gritty of it all, but I spent the next year trying to gain relevant skills with just one goal: to turn a strong no into an unequivocal yes.

Dogged Persistence

A singular focus is an incredibly strong force. Honestly, I don’t think there is anything more dangerous than a person absolutely obsessed with getting somewhere, and that was me. Moreover, if you are really enjoying something, it becomes an order of magnitude easier to keep going and hitting your targets.

However, it is a slippery slope. It really can impact your personal relationships and eat into any hobbies you have. You don’t want to think about anything else, maybe you just can’t; obsession really re-wires your entire brain. It is like gaming with the boys, where you sit on a chair and just play for hours on end. Your food is going cold, you have been holding your pee for the past 2 hours, your eyes are burning, but you don’t feel anything- the adrenaline rush is too overpowering. There were very strong signs that I was doing too much, but I just couldn’t stop.

Well, lesson no.1: tame your obsession.

I say this because you are going to crash. You might go on for some days, maybe weeks, and if you are ultra-hardcore, maybe some months. But you will burn. Every well-run machine needs lubrication and maintenance. But more on that later.

Anyway, the year went something like this.

1. Frustrated
2. I do research in a biofuel lab, making synthetic methane to get hands-on experience with my new obsession.
3. Mindlessly running scheduled operations in a room smelling like cow piss
4. Frustrated
5. Decide to make my own electrolyzer
6. Get no funding because lab members think it’s unsafe
7. Designs it anyways
8. Spends every single saved dollar from my research job to buy parts on Amazon/McMaster Carr
9. Assemble everything
10. sneak into the lab to use their pumps at night to test
11. leaks
12. iterate
13. leaks
14. iterate
15. doesn’t leak
16. Make KOH and drag the KOH-filled electrolyzer halfway across campus to the only outdoor spot with a power outlet
17. Run Machine -> make hydrogen -> reapply -> Interview -> get job -> start date in 4 months
    

For the next 4 months, I didn’t get hands-on at all.

Sounds like the perfect time for Lesson no.2: It is easy to go to failure doing arms; it’s fun. However, what really makes you a beast is going to failure doing something you are shit at (I hate doing legs).

I was still grinding. I got extremely good at first-principles thinking. Started dreaming about heat transferring in different ways. Started reading a lot more, and came up with cool concepts for a V2 of my electrolyzer. But, with my research coming to an end, I lost all access to the lab and the money that came with it. However, the truth is that I would have figured it out if I really wanted to.

I didn’t because I was enjoying the theoretical stuff so much. I always loved physics, and I just couldn’t stop myself from being consumed by the fundamentals. The problem is that I should have been working just as much, if not more, fixing my weaknesses. I have worked on a decent amount of hardware for a student, but the idea of failure still always haunted me. It’s because of the disjointed way I took on these projects. It felt like I was always relearning tools and processes because I just never got in enough reps to become effectively proficient. I never wanted to be the reason for a joint effort to fail; therefore, making my own electrolyzer was so helpful because I had no one but myself to disappoint. There is no reason to feel embarrassed when the only eyes on you are your own.

I should have kept building on that confidence those 4 months, but I chose to make my stronger muscles stronger, barely paying any attention to the weaker ones.

Even still, I at least felt 10x confident in my ability to come up with solutions by the end of those 4 months.

It was a pretty long road.