Career Path of a Technical Marketing Manager at Edmund Optics

Going into college, I knew I wanted to study something math or science-related, something technical. I loved nerdy math and science TV shows growing up, but I had no clue what I actually wanted to do. So I just chose mechanical engineering randomly and started at the University of Arizona.

It turns out the University of Arizona is one of the best schools in the world for optical engineering. That's doing something really cool with light, like laser eye surgery, self-driving cars, and virtual reality. I saw some demos the optical college did and thought it was really cool, so I switched into that and then I really loved it. Studying optics there was fascinating.

Then I got an internship at the company I now work for, Edmond Optics. They make mirrors, lenses, and prisms—all the little glass things that help robots see or do the cool things I was describing. I did an internship there in project management, which I really liked. I love the math and engineering side of things, but I didn't want to be in a lab for my whole career.

Project management was an interesting combination. You have to understand the technical side, but it also combines with business or some other softer skills. I liked that and thought that's what I wanted to do. At the end of the internship, I got a full-time job offer, so I accepted that.

I graduated from the U of A with my undergrad and started at Edmond Optics in a rotation-based program. This involved a few months in one department, a few months in another, bouncing around with my end goal always being project management.

As I was doing that, the head of sales and marketing asked if I would consider a rotation in marketing. This wasn't anything I'd considered because as an engineer, I was never taught that marketing was a career path or related to what I did. I never thought it was something I'd want to do.

But I did the rotation in marketing and ended up loving it. It involved helping write our technical marketing, including articles and scripts for videos, and putting on virtual events like webinars. Basically, all the ways we communicate our technical information out to other people, whether customers or the general public. I really liked that.

You kind of have to have the engineering background to really understand what you're talking about and speak intelligently about it. So I loved that. I ended up leaving the rotation-based program early. For the last five or six years, I've been in technical marketing.

Now it's grown into a whole team. I have a couple of employees, and we're just making all the information we send out to communicate with people across social media, our website, and in magazines. We do educational talks, things like that, just to educate people about the industry as a whole.

I'm also a translator between marketing and engineering, who have clashed in the past because they speak different languages and have different goals. So I found a nice intersection between marketing and engineering.