What influenced your decision to pursue this career path? I suppose this is a super-cliché and simple answer, but throughout high school I excelled in math and science, so engineering seemed like a logical choice. During my first year of college, I chose Aerospace Engineering because I was known as the “plane guy” who appreciated the intricacies of planes more than anything. Airshows, air and space museums, and anything aviation-related gave me the drive to understand how the things I was seeing worked and how I could someday design and build them myself. Then, after my first year at the University at Buffalo, I became a little more grounded and learned to appreciate cars much more than I had before. I figured, why not do a double major while I was at it? So, I added Mechanical Engineering.

What exactly does a vibration analyst do? It’s tough explaining to people what I do for a living, which isn’t surprising because the world of vibration analysis is so small and complex. Even after I began my internship with the company, it took me a year to really understand what it was that we do. We repair, calibrate and generally do everything related to vibration analysis, predictive maintenance and condition monitoring of rotating equipment.

The simplest way to explain it is that, as vibration analysts, we can predict how much life a piece of rotating equipment has left and how we can prolong it. We do this by using certain signatures found in a spectrum plot of acceleration data taken from the rotating equipment’s bearings. Obviously, there’s a lot more to it than that, but that should give you a good idea.

What are some of your biggest challenges at work? Calibration and repair make up the biggest part of our business, and the methods we use to do this are more like those of a metrology company. When metrology gets involved, the biggest challenge is figuring out how to calibrate a tool so that it reads a measured value as accurately as possible. This is especially difficult when we receive a new or previously unused tool that is reading inaccurately and must then figure out how to change internally stored factors that affect the live measured value.

Do you have any words of wisdom for a young person entering your field? Never stop learning! Just because you’ve finished school doesn’t mean you can’t gain more information on any topic. There’s so much knowledge in the world, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.

What is your greatest professional accomplishment thus far? Becoming a certified Category II Vibration Analyst through the Vibration Institute. It helped me put things into perspective that I was unable to see before and understand the data I was using much more effectively.

What are your professional goals? Tezzco is a small company, so I hope that I can help it grow and become much larger and more influential in the field. I’m the second-most-senior engineer here, so I feel I can help steer the company in the right direction, which makes my future so exciting to me.

Written by Ryan Capalbo; Researched by Karen Zedda