Steve Monette

Background

About Steve Monette

After graduating from college in 1986, I started in instrumentation and automation - and all these years later I still love it. I have always been interested in how things work and how to make them perform at their best. This interest has lead me down a few different paths in my career. I have always enjoyed getting machines to do what you want them to do. With the correct sensors, you can get feedback from the system thus allowing you to monitor and/or control that system. For me this is fascinating, challenging, and most of all fun. For example, one project I've built is a highly modified hot air popcorn popper that I use to roast coffee beans at home. Another, more complex project was an automated 100 gallon salt water reef tank that for the most part took care of itself. For the reef tank I used five individual controllers and an assortment of actuated valves. During my years of working in a Si3N4 Ceramics Research and Development facility, I developed my laboratory skills, mastered my attention to detail, practiced careful and proper lab behavior, and learned the importance of high quality data collection. After nine years there, I still looked forward to going to work as it was always a new day with something challenging to accomplish. My time at WRS sharply honed my troubleshooting skills, as most of the tools there had questionable documentation - either it did not exist or it was in another language - so we all got to be very proficient at understanding symptoms and diagnosing from there. Very challenging but fun. While at WRS I was awarded the opportunity of being the manager of the Facilities and Maintenance group. which again taught me the value of time management and organization, and allowed me to delve into City, County, State, and Federal compliance reporting. It was a tough one to learn but very interesting once I got started and developed a system to gather the data required for each report. Now, I'm at SigmaDesign and I have to say I love this job. My first four years here I built electrical control panels, fascinating work, and then I've been recently promoted to a control systems drafter and now up to my eyeballs in learning AutoCAD Electrical and drawing the schematics I used to build panels from. I'm also proud to say that have shaken hands and worked with with every connection in my list, not just building a FB friends list here.