Fred Serricchio
Senior Engineer
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Education
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
1994
California Institute of Technology
M.S., Mechanical Engineering
1994Podcasts
38:11443: What a Senior Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Does With Fred Serricchio, NASA’s JPL [Main T4C Episode]
Fred Serricchio is a senior engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he’s worked for the past 25 years. And if you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘cmon, it’s not rocket science,’ for Fred Serricchio, it really is! Fred’s work with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has led him to work directly..
Career Path
Interview Highlights
“The other heartbreak is you’ve been working on a project for a couple of years and then it gets canceled or it doesn’t get past a certain gate to proceed to the next level.”
Best Career Advice
“Be willing to take opportunities that are offered and available to you because sometimes they don’t come around very often.”
Career Challenge
“That first summer that I did end up at JPL, one of the first projects I was given was to measure the stiffness of a certain part that they were using in some mechanical design. It wasn’t set up like a typical exam problem in an undergraduate engineering class, you had to figure all that out. And as an undergraduate, that’s not something that you’re taught. That’s something that you learn after the class or on some of the more project classes or in graduate school because you have to synthesize the whole thing together. So I was having a real hard time, even formulating problems. And I was getting frustrated.”
Professional Interests
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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