README for Ben Felson
Hi, I’m Ben! Ben is pronounced like pen 🖊️. Felson is pronounced like 🍂fell+sun☀️.
My preferred pronouns are they/them, but I would also prefer that if you/someone else happens to use a different set of pronouns by accident, please don’t mention nor correct it. It truly isn’t a big deal to me, and I forget constantly whom I’ve told to use they/them when referencing me.
At Cadence OneFive, my role is…
I’m a newly minted Building Science Intern!
As I type this on Day 1, it seems (but may not hold true!) that my work will revolve around reading technical manuals for non-NYC climates and building typologies, thereafter translating them into Jupyter Notebooks as generalizable calculations.
Who am I?
Away from work
I live in Bushwick with my girlfriend and our two cats, Apricot 🐈 and Rigatoni 🐈⬛. It’s rare that during the school year I have much free time. When I do, I enjoy playing board games, learning the bass guitar I bought off Craigslist, baseball (watching, playing, and playing video games of it), 3D Printing, reading heat transfer journals, and caring to my kitties.
At work
I’ve always struggled to focus on singular items/topics. That has rang true in my working career, too! Here are some highlights of the last 6 years:
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I worked in the Computers section of Best Buy while in high school and sold enough product/services to rank as the second-best performing employee in the company worldwide, two years in a row! (Ironically, the first-place winner was another guy named Ben, who also lived in San Antonio, TX at the time)
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In 2020, I worked (unpaid 😥) for a startup that was trying to create “Ebay for Farmers.” Lot of full-stack stuff.
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I was a teaching assistant for Art of Engineering–which is the every-engineer-has-to-take-it class at Columbia–until we had to go on strike in 2023 for reducing our pay by 30% without telling us 😭 (they haven’t negotiated with us and never will).
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I worked in Columbia’s Creative Machines Lab (also unpaid 🥲) building an inverted laser sintering process for a “metal 3D Printer that could fit in an office.”
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I led Columbia’s Formula Racing team to build our first ever electric car and place higher than ever with our combustion car! Unfortunately, student clubs are unpaid and I ran out of money📉, leading to my next job!
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For the last two years, I wrote curriculum and taught coding classes to 5-13 year olds in Cobble Hill
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On the side, I’ve done freelance mechanical engineering projects over the past 3 years. These include
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Drafting the low and high voltage electrical schedules for a car wash
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Designing an industrial plumbing system for said car wash
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Helping many non-STEM-oriented inventors verify the integrity of their products and submit provisional patents
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I’m currently developing a data tag to stick on endangered whale species 🐳 to better monitor their migration and behavioral patterns without using invasive methods.
In spreading my claws into many mechanical engineering subfields, I’ve discovered many things I don’t like. Contrastingly, I’ve found I very much love heat transfer 😍🔥❤️🔥!!! My professional and personal goals involve finding a way to make a career out of thinking about heat transfer, which is a large part in why I’m here!
Goals
Learning goals
I want to learn more about heat transfer and thermodynamics as they apply to buildings. In a perfect world, I imagine myself translating complicated building thermal simulations into easier-and-faster-to-calculate equations based on known data.
Career goals
I love heat transfer and most of my life right now is focused on finding a way to make that my career for the next many number of years! Having tried many different subjects, I’m confident that this one is my favorite.
Ways of working together
I enjoy doing the ‘boring stuff’ offline and doing the ‘interesting stuff’ live.
That is, I enjoy being able to send random thoughts/messages knowing that my recipient won’t respond for a while. I like to complete tasks and correspond on them virtually. However, I also like people and talking to them, and I much prefer to positively hash out big projects or complicated concepts by talking, either in a call or in person.
Related: I have awful hearing, thanks to the lack of foresight exhibited by concert-loving 17-year-old Ben. I now wear hearing protection at concerts diligently, and if we meet in person I would love to not have background noise around.
You can lean on me to…
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Dive headfirst into interesting problems until a solution is found
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Boil down complicated concepts into easy-to-understand explanations
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Ask a lot of questions and realize that I know comparatively little compared to both what I want to know and what others know
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Care about the work I do
How to support me…
What will make me most successful in this–or any–role is to feel like the people I’m working with (i.e. you–reading this right now) want me to be here and value my contributions.
Mostly, I think that will come from time and conversation, both of which I’m looking forward to very much 😊
…as we work together
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When I unplug, I like to do so completely. Please understand that if I’m not working, I likely cannot take care of something until I’m working again. I, unfortunately, tend to have lots on my plate, and without my rest time I will go and have gone crazy.
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Please let me repeat back to you my understanding of something you said to verify that I’ve understood it correctly.
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If you ask me to do something that you have already done, please point me toward the related documentation
…as a person
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I would love for you to know that I value you, your expertise, and your input.
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If I do a good job, I would love to hear that you think I did a good job.
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If I do a bad job, I would love to hear why, but also that you don’t hate me because of it.
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If I do something wrong, I would love for you to know that I probably wasn’t trying to.
I’m my best self on a team when…
I work well in teams that I know. In writing this, I realize that there’s not much actionable about it, but I think I just need some time to get acclimated before I’ll be my ✨best✨ self. (In the meantime, my non-best self is still pretty cool).
Typically though, I don’t need much of a push to speak up with my thoughts, but I do get scared when there are 7+ people listening. I like to use the chat feature during calls to bring things up that I’m unsure about.
Feedback preferences
You can give me constructive👷♀️feedback whenever works best for you. In the moment is fine, after the fact is fine, and so is a year later. While not perfect, I’m always trying to be better, and I genuinely want to hear what you have to say.
In the off-chance you’re giving me non-constructive feedback, that’s okay, too. Honestly. But, please do so after the fact.
Technical preferences
I’m a Windows user, cursed by the unfortunate need to use SolidWorks twice a day. Otherwise, I don’t mind MacOS nor Linux distros.
You can send me words or code in English, Spanish, Python, Java, C++, SQL, JavaScript, G-Code, or pretty much anything else that isn’t MATLAB, which I have had enough of to last a lifetime.
I like drawing out my ideas in 2D and building that into 3D models with whatever CAD software is nearest. It’s tough for me to visualize physical phenomena without a picture.
In general, G Suite is not my favorite. I use MS Word, PPT, Excel for pretty much everything, although I accept that collaboration is necessary and often outweighs my preference. But if you happen to have a choice…
Schedule and availability
I work in the Eastern Time Zone (New York). I plan to be available 9AM-5PM on Wednesdays and Fridays at least, and likely another few hours (up to whatever NYSERDA will give me/us) on Mondays or Tuesdays.