Mendez Alzona, Systems Design Engineer VI
As a child, Mendez Alzona would watch WWII Japanese era fighter aircrafts on a black and white TV screen. He started to wonder how they worked and how they were built. When his mom noticed this, she bought Alzona science kits and he started building model rocket cars. As he continued to learn more about topics such as physics and science, his interest grew.
Alzona put that education to work when he attended the Polytex Institute of New York, which has since merged back to NYU. After college, Alzona went to work at General Electric Space Systems, where he designed power amplifiers among other things.
“In engineering, you have to be a forever student,” said Alzona.
According to Alzona, a good engineer has to be understanding and willing to take the time to learn new techniques to work on new products. Alzona highlighted the importance of bringing what you learned in the past to new projects and jobs, and learning and adapting to do state of the art work.
The second job Alzona accepted was one where he did not have the years’ experience that was required. However, since he had worked on specific projects that the hiring manager thought would be beneficial, he was hired. Alzona would go on to do state of the art work for the time.
“If you want to be a good engineer you have to love problems,” said Alzona.
When it comes to mentoring other engineers, Alzona says you need to put yourself in the shoes of the person that you are mentoring. He tells his engineers that they must always be willing to learn and he always emphasizes the fact that they must be disciplined in the work that do.
Outside of work you can find Alzona doing handy work around his home or taking classes to learn more about his trade. A favorite hobby of his is reading technical literature and trying to figure out how to solve the problem that he is reading about. You can also find him taking day trips with his wife on the weekends.
Want to learn more about life at CAES? Visit our Careers page here.