03/18/2024
Meet David Hutchison, a BYU Physics alum. Currently, he designs and builds new kinds of lidar. His company, Waymo, uses its lidar systems to make self-driving cars.
What advice would you give students?
1) Academia vs industry — I originally wanted to go into academia. I thought engineers in industry had kind of a boring job — that they just toiled away on nothing particularly novel, squeezing a few percent more efficiency out of something. However that hasn’t been my experience — I’ve really enjoyed many aspects of working in industry and I think it was always a better fit for me than academia. Maybe one day I’ll teach at a college or something, but for now, I’m enjoying the industry.
2) Don’t necessarily get too attached to any one field of physics. Turns out there is interesting physics all over, and you’d probably enjoy other parts of physics/engineering at some point. I had to change (from nanoscience/materials science, to optics/MEMS) in graduate school by necessity since the only professors in “my” original field were not accepting new students. I worried a bit about not really enjoying a new field but I did. Then for my first and second jobs I worried a bit about not enjoying it, but I did. Open your mind to the idea that you will probably enjoy whatever you end up doing even if it’s not what you originally thought.
3) Satisfaction is overrated. In retrospect, one thing that drew me to physics was the satisfaction of tackling something unknown and finally understanding it, or the satisfaction of tackling a homework problem and then conquering it and getting the right answer. I’m sorry to say, but in real-world physics and engineering you rarely have that sense of satisfaction. It’s messy and you never really get to the bottom of things.
