From the Crows' Nest

Ken Miller [00:00:09]:
Welcome to From the Crows' Nest, a podcast on Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations, or EMSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, Director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. You can follow me on LinkedIn or email me directly at hostromthecrowsnest.org. Thanks for listening. Before I get to my conversation, I do want to highlight a recent development that impacts our community. As you may have seen already on LinkedIn, retired US Army Colonel Laurie Buckhout, whom I had on the show earlier this month, Everyone should check out this episode. It was a great conversation. If you haven't listened to it yet, please take a moment to download it. Anyways, Laurie has been appointed as the new Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for cyber policy in DoD.

Ken Miller [00:00:53]:
This is fantastic news for not just for the EW community, but the entire non kinetics community field. We need to rethink the integration of cyber, EW and related disciplines. We continue to lose our advantage in the battlefield in this area and we need to we need to rethink the integration of cyber, EW and related disciplines. We continue to struggle to maintain our advantage in these areas and I I I personally think that Lori's expertise in all these fields, cyber and EW included, makes her the perfect candidate to really understand how they should fit together and what changes we need to make in policy to encourage and to facilitate that change. So I think I speak for the entire AOC community that we look forward to seeing the success that she has in this new role and we just appreciate her continued leadership on behalf of the non kinetic field. In this episode, I am joined by winners of the association of Old Crows Future 5 Award. Each year, the AOC Educational foundation honors five exceptional young professionals through its Future 5 program, which recognizes individuals who represent the future of the EMSO career field through innovation, leadership and impact. I am pleased to have four of the 2024 Future 5 Award recipients, Imani Davis, Matthew Copeland, Paul Kennedy, and Michael Gutierrez.

Ken Miller [00:02:18]:
These emerging leaders are tackling key questions in ew, from integrating cyber tools into engineering education to strengthening collaboration between R and D teams and those deploying new technologies. Despite their diverse roles, my guests share a common emphasis on the importance of mentorship and community in shaping successful careers in electronic warfare. Okay, so with that said, let's listen into my conversation with Future Five Award recipients here on from the Crow's Nest. So just to begin to make this conversation a little bit easier, I'm going to just bring on Amani and Matthew to start Imani Matthew, it's great to have you Here on from the Crow's Nest. I'll start with you, Imani. Tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from, and what you do for living here in the EW community.

Imani Davis [00:03:05]:
Absolutely. So, Imani Davis, born and raised in Clarksville, Tennessee. I started, I guess, my career in EW in Huntsville, Alabama, after graduating from Alabama A and M University and got a BS in computer science and started working with a defense contractor as a software engineer. Took a really high interest into cyber and then changed over to a cyber software engineer. I was only at that first organization for about a year until I transferred up to NSWC Crane up in Crane, Indiana. I got engaged, so congratulations. Thank you. That's where we decided to settle.

Imani Davis [00:03:48]:
Um, so Crane actually introduced me to the world of ew. I joined the Spectrum Warfare Department and started on a project that had an interest in mission analytics. And I started as, like the cyber SME there. So I got to grow up into a role really fast.

Ken Miller [00:04:07]:
And everyone at Crane, they're fascinating people up there. Fascinating work. Pretty much anything that's naval or even joint EW at some point goes through Crane. So you get a lot of exposure to just about everything that's going on. DOD at some point.

Imani Davis [00:04:21]:
Yes, a lot of exposure. And I talked a bit about my mentors in my AOC speech. Really knowledgeable folks up there, and they're so willing to reach out to the young and new engineers and say, well, what do you want to do? What do you want to get into? Here's the projects that I'm on. If you're interested in something else, I can get you onto that. And again, my interest was in cyber, and I was like, cybernew kind of have a bit of the same. They're a bit of. It's all electronic warfare technically. And that got a little pushback in the beginning.

Imani Davis [00:04:54]:
But as we can see, even AOC, the organization itself has sema, so the cyber electromagnetic activities, and just really growing into that. So.

Ken Miller [00:05:04]:
And that's actually a good transition to introduce Matthew Copeland, because he is connected with some of the CIMA work. So, Matthew, could you tell us a little bit about your background and where you are at today?

Matthew Copeland [00:05:17]:
Yeah, of course. I actually also started off in Huntsville, Alabama. I grew up there way back in the day, and I went to University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa for my college. I only worked in Huntsville for a couple months actually, though, before I went down to Eglin Air Force Base, the contractor company that I was working for at the time. Their main location was In Huntsville. Secondary was in Egland and I went down there because it seemed like a nice place to be on the beach to do some work on an sort of AI focused project where we were trying to use this, this video game actually called Arma 3 that has a pretty sizable modding community. We were trying to use it as sort of a environment to test out some AI applications. And they were like, well, you know, we're, we're actually also trying to set up a base of operations in Aberdeen, Maryland.

Matthew Copeland [00:06:14]:
So I got picked to go up there and help start that out. So since then I've been supporting the C5ISR center until two years ago when I actually switched over to the government side.

Ken Miller [00:06:27]:
So. Well, so. So since we. I did not realize that both of you are from Share Share a background of. In. In Alabama and Huntsville.

Ken Miller [00:06:35]:
So question for you. I'm a sports fan. Do you know the minor league baseball team in Huntsville, the Trash Pandas. Trash Pandas, yes, exactly. The Rocket City Trash Pandas. I went down to Huntsville a couple years ago and I saw the billboards for their games. I'm like, that's an amazing baseball team name, like Rocket City Trash. So I got, I got stuff, I got T shirts and I gave them to my girls.

Ken Miller [00:06:57]:
And so now they're like, every time they see a raccoon, it's like, it's a trash panda. So we're, we're, we're spreading allegiance to that even up here in Pennsylvania. So that's great.

Matthew Copeland [00:07:07]:
Awesome. Yeah, I believe the name was crowdsourced, actually.

Imani Davis [00:07:11]:
Yeah, the city voted for it.

Ken Miller [00:07:13]:
We need to do that type of, that type of exercise more because that's just a fun name for a team anyways. But that's not related to electronic warfare, just kind of fun. But anyways, so Imani, you had mentioned in your opening remarks. It was also in some of the submissions that you made, you know, talking about really your goal of wanting to convert work in the convergence of EW and cyber through R and D and workforce development and collaborations and a lot of the things that make the process to finding next generation solutions work hugely. This has been a question in our community for a long, long time is how do we bring these two together? Because literally when you look out at security matters around the world, it all comes down to how you operate in cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum. Bringing those two together is the key. Talk to us a little bit about your goal of wanting to work in this space and hopefully maybe you're going to be the One to actually come up with a solution to how this can be done.

Imani Davis [00:08:11]:
That would be pretty cool. I'll start that off by just saying through discussions amongst the community, everyone kind of has a different answer for I'll have the term RF enabled cyber. So we've got the EW folks that are, I won't say they're not as interested in it. They are coming along and understanding there may be some crossover with the RF side. So the biggest gap right now, step one is trying to get the EW engineers to learn more of the cyber side, the offensive side and defensive. That's what my workforce development efforts have been this past year. So getting some of those cyber tools, I got some trihackme licenses that focuses on offensive cyber as well as some defensive learning as well. But providing that to the ew, we have mission modelers and those folks model force level EW really been trying to beef up their knowledge on the cyber side so they can model cyber effects in their force level EW mission modeling.

Imani Davis [00:09:13]:
And that's huge for I think the industry and Crane as well. Because if we can model those effects and get the EW engineers to understand those effects and how it impacts kind of that force level mission, we're going to make some leaps and bounds in our mission planning and it's going to really impact operators and even the planners.

Ken Miller [00:09:32]:
Bring it back to you, Matthew. You know, in, in your video, I was watching your video before we came into the studio and you had, you talked about some having the facing the challenge of having to look up sometimes from what you're working on to see the impact that you're having in support of the war fighter in saving their lives. And sometimes it's you're, you're looking so much at the problem or, or your project that you're not really seeing how it relates to the operations in the field and the effect that it's having. Talk a little bit about some of the challenge of working in the space that gets so technical you have to put your head down and really come up with a solution. Sometimes it is hard to look up and say, oh, wait a second, we're having a huge impact on saving lives and you know, succeeding in our mission.

Matthew Copeland [00:10:15]:
I guess when I first started off, challenge that I was really facing is that most of the work that I'm doing is in the R and D space and we're looking for a lot of times the golden goose sort of solution that solves all the problems and makes everything work and you know, has no countermeasures against it. But then like when you don't find something like that, because most of the time something like that doesn't exist, you have to kind of start scaling down a little bit and trying to find something that meets most of the needs of the warfighter or something that's I guess, the best fit, something that does something instead of doing nothing. Because a lot of the times, I guess I. From what I've found in the acquisitions world is we tried to develop requirements for a system that can sort of set up a system to be a jack knife where it can. Or Swiss army knife where it can kind of do a little bit of everything and not really do anything exemplary. And I think a lot of times there's really a benefit of being able to develop something that does one thing very well for a specific purpose. But a lot of the times when we start trying to push something like this out into the. I guess into the project managers and the people who are going to actually take these concepts that we're developing and build them, we struggle to keep focus on this one problem.

Matthew Copeland [00:11:53]:
That's a very important problem that we believe our technology can help to solve. Because these things kind of get chopped up and by different things like prohibitive cost or size, power constraints. And we see that we end up getting something that isn't very useful against anything because it was pushed towards being a solution to address a little bit of everything.

Ken Miller [00:12:19]:
Both you and Mani work in government agencies, so you have that inside insider perspective of having to deal with the processes from the inside that we have to kind of guide all of the development of new systems. Matthew, I'll start with you and then I'll come back to you, Imani, but can you talk to us a little bit about how the processes that you interact with on a daily basis in the R and D world and developing technology. What are some of the things that you hope to see change over the years to make it easier to address some of the challenges in technology? Because you kind of mentioned it, Matthew, the fight today is so dynamic. You can't just have a technology that's one thing in the field and is designed for one thing, because that one thing is going to change dynamically as soon as the fight begins. And so you do need that Swiss army knife concept to what you're doing because you have to have the adaptability in the system. So our acquisition system is not designed for that typically. So talk a little bit about what you face on a day to day basis of the way that we organize that like there's certain things that you hope to see improve over the years in your career. Is it funding? Is it consistent funding? Is it all the various reviews, exercises, the clarity of requirements? What are some of the things that you see that kind of, that make it hard to keep up with the pace of technology?

Matthew Copeland [00:13:43]:
Yeah. So one of the challenges that I've found in the R and D world is us not being as closely connected to the project managers as we probably should be. And I think that any collaboration that we can get with the people who are actually writing the requirements and fielding these technologies will be greatly beneficial to how, or I guess to enable the research that we're doing in these use cases that we're finding to be applied correctly and successfully in these fielded systems. If we come up with a concept, a lot of times the pieces that make it through to the PM side are things like how much power we think we need and where we think we should employ this or how it should be used. And a lot of the times there's a lot of stuff that doesn't make it through that. We're very critical in, I guess, developing the use case for these systems and if we can collaborate better on this, it would really help us ensure that these requirements are, I guess it would help drive home that the requirements that we think there are for these systems are critically important so that they can't necessarily be changed over time to try to fit a secondary requirement for cost. Sometimes if you want a technique to work, there's some things you can't make sacrifices on.

Ken Miller [00:15:33]:
It's a matter of, you know, at each step along the way make having to make these critical decisions that will affect the outcome, the what you get to the field. But you're, there's a lot of, lot of moving pieces to try to keep in line as you reach each stage of development. So Imani, coming over to you, what has your been your experience? We said earlier, you know, working with this convergence between cyber and EW has had the solution has eluded us. And I'm sure, like when you look see all the joint EW programs coming through Crane, you can you have a, a good glimpse of the collaboration that does exist and maybe still needs to continue to exist. So talk a little bit about some of those challenges that you face.

Imani Davis [00:16:14]:
Absolutely. I think a little bit of the challenge when it comes to collaboration on joint efforts is the different silos that the organizations we put ourselves into. Like, okay, for example, if Crane only focused on EW and they only agreed to take ideas and New innovative solutions on ew, we will lose out on different opportunities to one, collaborate with other organizations on some of their new ideas, or even encourage people when they have an idea that's not directly related to ew. So, and then bringing it over to cyber, that community is extremely siloed. I found challenges in trying to figure out who I can connect with when it comes to like, okay, I have this idea, I bring it up to my management, the project managers, and they go out and try to find other people at their level at the organizations looking for an idea related or with funding, for example, funding for cyber solutions. And it kind of just stops just because we're in silos. And it's like if I was a project manager, maybe I'm only focused on getting solutions from these four or five specific organizations. So that's one of the challenges.

Imani Davis [00:17:32]:
The other is if we're behind in finding solutions, like we're trying to keep up the pace. We need to encourage rapid innovation and have funding that supports that. So have some calls out. Do you have any ideas in AI EW Cyber and be able to award that funding in a reasonable timeframe, not over six months. You know, let people get their idea, propose their idea, and maybe in the next two months you'll have your seedling funding to have like a basic, meet your basic hypothesis and then maybe even compete for continuous funding and then maybe have experimentation events that you can then test these new rapidly innovated solutions and then you could then deploy them. For example, I'm not sure if anyone has heard of Silent Swarm, but that's one of those fleet experimentation events that they allow low TRL technologies to come out and test their capabilities and enable application.

Ken Miller [00:18:35]:
All right, so I'd like at this time to bring into the studio Paul Kennedy and Michael Gutierrez. And welcome, gentlemen, to from the Crow Nest. Thank you for sitting patiently until I, I came around to you. Appreciate you taking time to join me. Paul, I'll start off with you. Tell us a little bit about yourself. I, I saw in your video. It was a great video.

Ken Miller [00:18:58]:
Well, congratulations on birth of your. Your, your daughter super cute as, as, as a girl dad, you know, like, I, I saw him like, oh, okay. Glad you won it. So, really enjoyed that. Talk a little bit about your background, where you came and what you're doing now. Thanks.

Paul Kennedy [00:19:15]:
Yeah, my wife and I really enjoyed making that video, actually. It was a lot of fun. She was like two weeks old at the time.

Ken Miller [00:19:20]:
Well, I, and, and I saw that you, I mean, everyone has a different parenting style. But you were reading your daughter the Jed magazine, and I it was quite evident that she fell immediately asleep. So. Which Jed's a great magazine, but you definitely had the key to helping a baby sleep, right?

Paul Kennedy [00:19:40]:
Absolutely. So my background, I come from Yorktown, Virginia and I did my bachelor's and master's in electrical engineering at Virginia Tech. After that I came to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory where I've had a number of opportunities, participating in EW prototyping and field testing and hardware in the loop design mostly for airborne EW concepts. And I am currently a project manager in the Electronic Warfare Advanced.

Ken Miller [00:20:05]:
Bellinger and Michael Gutierrez, tell us a little bit about yourself and where. Where you've come from.

Michael Gutierrez [00:20:11]:
Sure, yeah. Thanks. Great to be here, Ken. I was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I spent the first 19 years of my life there before I moved to New York City for university studies. I always say that the only thing similar between New York and New Mexico is that they both start with new because everything was so different when I first landed there. So I studied applied math and computer science there, interned at Facebook a couple of times, and then at Palantir, which actually really got me hooked on defense work through some of the first few Palantir employees. I then got a deeper look into a very few select number of startups working specifically in defense.

Michael Gutierrez [00:20:48]:
That led me to wrapping up the last bit of my undergrad semesters at Epirus, building high powered microwave weapons, and then a short bit at the Missile Defense Agency as part of the Hacking for Defense course at my university. So it was really Epirus that piqued my interest in rf. And then the MDA solidified my interest in really pursuing EW as a career field, which took me to Palantir after graduating. Got to touch a little bit of embmj, which I'm just shocked at how well that team is able to execute on that. And then now to CX2, building again aerial defense system. So not so dissimilar to what Paul's hanging out with now.

Ken Miller [00:21:30]:
You mentioned that you at least a couple times or on some sort of regular basis participated in defense hacking competitions. Tell us a little bit about these competitions that you actually helped organize. You didn't just participate, correct?

Michael Gutierrez [00:21:46]:
That's correct. I usually say that that was the not as fun part of the job, but after seeing the outcome and turnout that we got over two different hackathons, I was more than proud of myself and the rest of the team that it took to organize those. So yeah, it was really just an idea that we, meaning myself and three other friends, Peter, Anish and Simon, had the idea of. We enjoy tinkering on some of this robotics stuff. We're pretty passionate about the national security effort and we've almost were convinced that there were other people that wanted to do the same. So we ideated that there was maybe a public forum or public venue that would actually serve well to sort of bring those people together. And really the, the root sort of grounding effort that we wanted to instill in these events is having influence from real industry where, you know, we were not building a lightsaber, where people actually just wanted to see better in the dark. So we wanted to have a really close sort of connection with the people who were using, assessing and interested in this stuff from the, the battlefield perspective.

Michael Gutierrez [00:22:59]:
So we started one in New York City that is not the most popular place for defense work and hardware work, but we had people flying in from Atlanta, from California and from Michigan. And so it was a pretty, pretty crazy sight to see people making a trek like that. We had some fantastic startups and military personnel on site, really just kind of rounding out the experience. And a lot of the feedback we got after that was I always wanted to work on this and I have been working on it in silence. This is the most fun I've had in a long time because I got to do it with a lot of people sitting next to me. And so that one in New York grew to another one in California where we expected around 200 people, where New York had about 60. And we ended up having more than 400 unique faces come through. So it was very fulfilling.

Ken Miller [00:23:47]:
And Paul, I want to bring you in on, you know, you had mentioned in, in your, in your video or application, you know, being in this field, doing the work that you do with Johns Hopkins has been intellectually freeing and rewarding. Talk to us a little bit about that because I think that that's key to innovation is being able to, to free your mind to look at solutions from different angles, everything, you know, and just being able to understand the impact that you are having. So share with us your thoughts a little bit on that. On that.

Paul Kennedy [00:24:17]:
Yeah, I find the mission impact part of the job very rewarding. And I think at the Apply Physics laboratory, being a university affiliated research center where you work, we're kind of especially well positioned to focus on those critical challenges and critical contributions. Critical challenges. We have a little bit of independence there from, especially in the, some of the irate efforts I've had the opportunity to participate in. So most recently I did some work on collaborative EW that was internally funded and that actually ended up being a presentation that I gave at the Magoo 2024 AOC Collaborative EW Symposium out there. And that was a really great experience too, being able to share those ideas with the community. That's a really unique value that the AOC provides is having those classified conference venues for those discussions.

Ken Miller [00:25:05]:
Yeah, for those who aren't familiar with AOC that are listening, our conferences are typically the classified ones. Whether it's Point Magoo, which is collaborative, we have a sema, we have one at Crane, a Capability GAPS conference in Crane, and then our aoc, our annual AOC show is the unclassified show. So you don't get the classified material there, but you get the global community to interact with the global community. So you all taken all together, it's a great way to kind of stay a part of the community throughout the year. So, Michael, I was intrigued by what you had mentioned previously that your goal is building at least one successful EW focused company. Clearly the entrepreneurial element of how you approach your job came through very clearly and all this, all the submissions that you made. So tell us a little bit about your goal to enter the world of innovation, entrepreneurship and kind of how does that guide you in your day to day job?

Michael Gutierrez [00:26:04]:
Yeah, I think the North Star is always delivering effective capabilities to the warfighter. That's sort of been something that I've developed the most clear passion about because of the importance that I personally place on the United States being the more powerful presence. So the circles that I've been around in startups have shown me the speed and success of innovation that can be had when you have the sort of venture capital backing combined with a DC presence, combined with really strong engineering talent. And over the sort of late 2000s, early into mid-2010s, there was a lot of our best talent that was not working for the government and not working for military efforts. Whereas in the sort of advent of Silicon Valley, it actually started with government funding and government collaboration. So that sort of convergence at the start, divergence later on, and now I think there is a stronger convergence these days, was super motivating to me back when in 2020 when I was pursuing the Palantir offer. It was not attractive on my campus or anything to be working with the government, with the military or on national security issues. And at the time, Palantir and maybe Anduril were the only ones really doing it in the public eye.

Michael Gutierrez [00:27:35]:
Palantir was very unattractive Anduril was also even more unattractive working with the border. So it, it just became something that I sort of had in the back of my head and, you know, found the right crowd that really thought the same way and helped foster me into a role where I was a good enough engineer to really make a dent on something. And I've had consistent mentorship both from the startup world and the government world to really do something that matters to somebody other than myself. And the early traction that we've had at CX2, which is kind of my first at bat at doing exactly that in creating a useful defense company in EW has been by far the most memorable parts of the last six, seven months of this company's existence. And it's really the fuel that keeps me going for the next many years, I hope.

Ken Miller [00:28:31]:
Now, I previously asked Amani and Matthew the difficult question about, you know, what are some of the obstacles that you confront? They're both in the, on the, from the government side, Michael, you're with Palantir Defense Company. Paul, you are at Johns Hopkins. So more academia, different perspectives. So we have like, we have every segment here represented. Same question to you from, from, from the academia or industry side, what are some of the challenges or obstacles that you hope to see changes in that will help help us in, in our efforts to develop this next generation technology?

Paul Kennedy [00:29:11]:
So one of the trends recently on the technological side that I'm pretty sure in is the emergence of open standards and they're increasing integration into duty requirements. So things like Sosa or some of the various software frameworks. So with that I'm interested to see if that really does deliver on the promise of accelerating innovation, opening up opportunities for maybe smaller organizations or in my particular case more academic organizations to contribute to a portion of one of these larger programs. I'm also interested in some of the challenges that go with that. If it delivers on that pace of innovation, how do we also keep up from a test perspective? How do we build confidence that if we're constantly pushing out these new update systems that they're going to perform and deliver that mission impact? So there's a lot of interesting work there, I think in terms of whether it should be economical to field test all of those or if there's alternatives in terms of modeling, simulation development, or in particular hardware in the loop prototyping that can help supplant some of that.

Ken Miller [00:30:12]:
Michael, I'll turn over to you.

Michael Gutierrez [00:30:14]:
Yeah, I think actually Imani's mention of Silent Swarm is a great sort of manifest of what actually is required to sort of give or extend the ladder in a way to give the startups that are six, seven months old a proving ground, to show this is what I can do in just six short months or six short weeks even, and this is what I need your help on. I will do what you tell me to do in that if you tell me this is broken or this was done well or this was done poorly, I will take that feedback into account. And I think it's things like Silent Swarm that really give the connectivity or connective tissue to these startups to actually grow and collaborate into something that is, again, not a lightsaber when you just want to see better in the dark, but actually delivering a really innovative capability that is actually useful to somebody.

Ken Miller [00:31:09]:
So at this time, I actually want to bring everyone in, Imani and Matthew as well, just to kind of wrap up our conversation. I want to ask a question and give each of you opportunity to answer, to talk a little bit about mentorship, because, you know, you each have very diverse backgrounds. I know. At least Imani and Paul, your parents to young children, very cute children. So I've been. I've been watching Imani's special guest here. And, you know, like I said, as a parent, you know, it's hard to pursue a career, to make a difference in that way. You know, obviously keep the priorities of family together, that balance.

Ken Miller [00:31:52]:
Mentorship is probably a big thing, and I would imagine many of you have had mentors, and I would imagine, based on what you've talked about here on this episode, as well as, you know, this process of being one of the future 5, you hope to be a mentor someday. So I want to ask a little bit about that role of mentorship in your life and what you hope to give back. And, Matthew, I'll start with you, actually.

Matthew Copeland [00:32:17]:
Sure. So I'm very grateful for the mentorship that I've received throughout my career. They've done a lot to make sure that I've been able to grow as an employee, as a person. They've made sure that I'm in the right place at the right time, in the right room to be able to learn the sort of things I need to learn and be part of the conversation when these important decisions are being made. And I'm eternally grateful for them for that. And I think that they serve very well as, I guess, a point of reference for me to try to live up to when I'm passing down my knowledge to the next generation. That follows. We were involved with a lot of internship programs on the government side, from smart students to other methods of just getting younger employees in through the door.

Matthew Copeland [00:33:13]:
And I've tried to be very accessible for these, for these newer employees and interns so that I can talk with them, answer any questions that they might have, and also try to engage with them outside of work in the EW world. One of the big things that I've focused on in the past year is trying to set up a SEMA club outside of work so that a lot of the skills that we're developing in the lab, a lot of this knowledge that we're accruing, sometimes it's easier to stay focused and want, have a strive to learn about this sort of stuff if you're engaging with it in the real world. And sometimes there's just a bit too much of a separation between, I guess, how this stuff is applicable in your day to day life when you're thinking about it in regards to the army and the DoD in general.

Ken Miller [00:34:07]:
Thank you. And I do want to actually mention it just popped in my mind as I was watching your video prior to being in the studio. I was highly impressed with your Rubik's Cube skills. That was impressive. The moment you started doing that, I'm like, you knew you were going to be able to solve that before, before the end of the video. But I was like, dang, that, that, that's, that's impressive. I guess when you can solve it that fast, you become an engineer. That's, that's kind of a prerequisite.

Ken Miller [00:34:34]:
I was one of the, I was actually one of the people who tore all the stickers off and put them back in the right. So that's why I'm a podcast host and not, and not an engineer, but impressive nonetheless. Amani, let me, let me go to you and, and, and ask for your, your thoughts on mentorship.

Imani Davis [00:34:53]:
Yeah, mentorship has been huge for me. Like Matthew said, having mentors that are trying to get you in at the right space, in the right room at the right time, but also really encouraging, encouraging you to speak up for your ideas. So I would go to some of my mentors, Erica White, Matt Harvey, and I've got a whole bunch of informal mentors as well that I'd go to and say, I've got this idea, but it's kind of out of the box and they give their full support, try and find other folks or other proposal ideas that I can go and spread these ideas and see where it really takes off to. As far as providing mentorship. I Was able to have my first set of interns this past summer. And that was so, that was so much fun looking back and seeing, you know, the young engineers, they come in so excited and ready to work. It's really great getting to interact with them, but also being able to challenge their minds and get them to think, how can you take this idea or some of the skills that you're learning in school and transition it over to making an impact on the world and for defense, making an impact on the war fighters. It's just a really fun time.

Imani Davis [00:36:11]:
I love talking, I love mentorship, the whole idea of it and, and seeing folks grow.

Ken Miller [00:36:18]:
Paul or Michael, do you have anything to add on. On the mentorship question?

Paul Kennedy [00:36:23]:
So I come from a family of engineers. You know, it goes back to, you know, building Pinewood Derby cars or taking things apart around the house. Working on cars with my dad. His dad was an engineer. My dad, my uncle went to Virginia Tech as well. And my cousin's also elected one senior. So, yeah, I never really had a choice. Right.

Paul Kennedy [00:36:39]:
But it's been great. So very early on, STEM mentorship was huge for me, getting me into the field of engineering. And then in my professional career, I've had great technical mentorship from my supervisor, Matthew Schar, and then in my involvement with aoc, in particular with IRAD and conference preparation, John Ward, the president of the Chesapeake Bay Roost, the Association of Old Crows, has been a big mentor for me as well and has actually gotten me more involved in the Roost level as well. So continuing on that theme of STEM mentorship, tangential to that Chesapeake Bay Roost where the scholarships and awards chair is supporting high school senior scholarships. So for students in the Anne Arundel County, Baltimore county and Howard county areas, we currently have our application process open.

Ken Miller [00:37:29]:
And Michael, I'll give you the final word. So go ahead.

Michael Gutierrez [00:37:35]:
I think this is a fantastic recap from the other three already. I really do think the best students come from the best teachers and then later on they become great teachers themselves. I think the biggest benefit that I've seen is, I think Matthew and Amani spoke on this is seeing people advocate for me behind my back, you know, behind doors and rooms that I'm not in, but also feeding me criticism to my face and giving me a high bar to try to reach and they care enough to keep raising it and kind of make that not a one time thing, but a continuous thing. That's just extremely humbling. And I'm lucky to have a handful of those people in my life. So, yeah, exerting their own time and even authority in certain cases to surround me with experiences that not only benefit the company, but me personally. It's just fantastic to be in a spot like that.

Ken Miller [00:38:27]:
Well, Imani, Matthew, Paul, Michael, thank you so much for joining me here on from the Crows Nest. It's really great to sit down and chat with you for a little bit. Fantastic accomplishments. And, you know, hopefully someday, you know, you'll, you'll, you'll stay in the field and maybe someday you'll be my boss. And so that's kind of why I wanted to have you on early to kind of, you know, get on your good side here as you begin your career. But, but thank you for joining me here. From the grossest. It's great to.

Ken Miller [00:38:52]:
Great to talk with you.

Imani Davis [00:38:53]:
Thanks, Ken.

Michael Gutierrez [00:38:54]:
Thanks, Ken. Great to be here.

Paul Kennedy [00:38:56]:
Thanks, Ken.

Matthew Copeland [00:38:58]:
Thank you.

Ken Miller [00:39:00]:
That will conclude this episode of From the Crows' Nest. I'd like to thank my guests Imani Davis, Matthew Copeland, Paul Kennedy, and Michael Gutierrez for joining me. Don't forget to review, share and subscribe to this podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners. Also, please take a moment to fill out our listener survey. If you complete the survey, you are eligible for a free From the Crows' Nest podcast T shirt while supplies last. That's it for today. Thanks for listening.