The Voices of Future Engineering Leaders - Meet Sajon Seaberg

I am very excited to be joined by Sajon Seaberg.? I met him a few years ago at a student leadership event and thought of him as I was putting this program together. Please go ahead and introduce yourself and we'll get started.

My name is Sajon Seaberg. I'm a senior studying mechanical engineering at Purdue University, so I'll graduate this December at Purdue. I've been involved in a couple different things. Susan and I met at an ASME event and I was a chapter's president in 2022. Since then I have served as a mechanical engineering ambassador. And then most recently I've been running an engineering leadership class with my friend Jack, it's by students for students. And then this summer I'll be interning with the air mechanics branch at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Tell us a little bit about that leadership class, that is not something you always hear about undergrads putting together:

This is an initiative that our friend Sam Delo started.? A year ago, he came up with this idea, this is his brainchild. He came up with this idea and he said, “I think it would be really cool if we could provide leadership training for students to help them get a grasp of fundamentals.” Things like, how do you establish mission vision goals? How do you determine what your culture is going to be? How do you refine your culture? He graduated last year, obviously doing bigger and better things.? But he pitched the idea to myself and to Jack and it sort of became a thing that we trial ran in the fall of last year with the presidents of engineering organizations at Purdue.?

We got their feedback, figured out what they thought would be useful and what they didn't like too much.? Then this last semester, our advisor Steven, allowed us to teach it as a class. We had 20 students participate. We covered everything we thought would be useful for students. We brought in guest speakers and then we kind of wrapped it up.? We're looking to do it again next semester. It’s a very, very unique opportunity. It’s by students for students, for college credit.

We're hoping to bridge that gap between student skills and industry skills. It's very relaxed, which I think a lot of our peers really enjoy.? And they are not being necessarily talked down to, but we're speaking from experiences that they can easily draw from.

What about engineering do you find exciting for your career path?

A lot, my current goals, early career wise, are to get involved in design and analysis for aerospace. I have been very fortunate to have two internships with NASA going onto my third this summer. I think I'd like to continue with space exploration in the future. I've still got a master's I want to get through before I make that final decision. But I think what's most exciting for me is that the problems that we're looking to solve, or at least are investigating, are ones that haven't really been solved yet. It’s so cool to be a part of. Being a part of an organization that is consistently looking for something new to tackle is what really gets me going.?

I also think that another beautiful part of engineering is that it's where innovation inspires people.? I can think back in a moment for myself in particular, I was a big robotics kid, and there's a very distinct moment when there's a shift between I'm just doing this, because I think it would be good for me, to I'm doing this, because I think that there's potential for me to get involved in this as a career. This was eighth grade and we had made it to the world's robotics competition and we were the first team from Kansas to be able to do that.?

That was just so exciting. I think that the impact that I had from other people doing something so cool is something that I eventually want to get into now that I'm older.? I've seen what true engineering projects can be, and I think being able to engage with other people about things that I'm fascinated in, is really what I'm so excited about.

How do you see your career path contributing to the betterment of society?

I think I'm going to kind of answer this in two different ways. One, as sort of an engineer and then the other part as a leader and how I see myself playing using my career to better my society around me.?

I think as an engineer, in space in particular, I just find it fascinating and has a lot of potential to inspire people in the way that robotics kind of inspired me as a kid. I think the world will always need engineers. There's always a problem to be solved. And I think engineering is a beautiful curriculum in that it teaches you to solve problems. Maybe not engineering down the line, but the curriculum itself is designed to teach you how to solve a difficult problem. I think that in whatever career that I'm in, the engineering that I'll be learning will help other people learn as well. And it just so happens to be that aerospace engineering is the medium that I kind of want to do that in.? History of space being that inspiration for the future's been around since the sixties, and that's exciting.

Before I get to my second part, one of the cool things that I was able to do during my first internship was with one of my mentors, Shanna. She is from Missouri and an elementary school in Missouri that we did this STEM outreach event for. She started out by giving kind of an intro of what space exploration is, why Mars research is really cool. On Mars, there's ingenuity, which is like a helicopter, a drone that's up there. And we did this activity with these kids where we basically worked them through a marshmallow scale version of it. So we had them make a big marshmallow, connected with toothpicks, with the little marshmallows, and we kind of related to what that resembles for us. I think it was really cool, because at the end we did a little Q&A.? We had all this flurry of questions and the coolest part about it was all these kids had such unique questions that even we never thought to ask in the first place. I think engineering, being a catalyst for inspiration, is really cool in that way.

Go ahead with the second part:

I talked about being an engineer, but now I kind of want to talk about being a leader. I think my favorite part about being in this industry and being at school has been being able to connect with people and learning from them and learning about their walks of life. I feel that as an engineer, I want to tackle engineering problems, but as a leader, I want to tackle people's problems. Whatever direction my career ends up, I'll be working with people from around the world. My hope is that I can make a positive impact on them and hopefully they can carry that forward.

Engineering is a team sport, I like to say. You don't do it alone, you're doing it as a team and solving problems for society. There are times you invent something for fun, but usually there's something there you want to be happening to do with. It is great that you see how those other skills are going to be so much a part of what your engineering career is and you're teaching them.?

Do you have anything else that you would like your professors or future managers to know?

The biggest thing is that the needs of people change very quickly, just as quickly as maybe industry or markets might change, if not faster. I think people in general, professors, managers kind of just need to be aware and willing to adapt as time goes on. I think in the last few years alone, we've seen a lot of dramatic changes in the way people work. I think we've also been seeing that people tend to prioritize themselves a little bit more, whether it comes to mental health or taking care of their family, things like that. I think we've seen a lot of really interesting trends, and this has been a huge thing for myself and for my peers at Purdue.

Engineering's hard, it's really hard. I mean, there's been a lot of really new initiatives at Purdue to really sort of improve access to mental health resources and things like that. I started seeing a therapist recently, highly recommended to anyone who thinks that they might need it, but engineering, it's really difficult and knowing when to ask for help is arguably even more difficult. So I think in terms of the question, kind of bringing it back, what I want professors and future managers to really know is that it's okay to give a little grace every once in a while and to ask someone how they're doing beyond the intent of just making some small talk. I think it's hard to be proactive with that type of thing.?

Before we go, do you have any shout outs you want to make to anybody?

ASME advisors, Desh, Cia, Amy Marke have been instrumental in my undergraduate career. Love Professor Beth Hess, advisor, Steven Stewart. Both of them have just been people I can go to talk about anything. And I think you can find mentors and your friends as well. I work with hundreds of people at school, but I particularly want to shout out Jack Walsh. He's been an incredible friend and individual that I highly look up to, and he's been a lot of fun to work on this class with, so had to give him a shout up to