Getting a Look at Things to Come

If you’ve come to Okuma America in Charlotte for a machine tool demo in the past couple years, I was likely the person who got our showroom ready for your visit. I make sure the space and the machines are properly maintained, cleaned and prepped so your session runs smoothly. (In the photo here you can see me doing some prep work on a MULTUS U3000.) Sometimes, if the team needs help setting up for your project, I’ll jump in and lend a hand there too. All of this gives me the opportunity to see a wide variety of parts that are being run in our industry.

Learning the Ropes

From my perspective this is a great job for me as I learn the ropes at Okuma, because I get the chance to learn a little bit about everything. In the future this will help me know where I want to steer myself in terms of becoming a more focused specialist. Do I want to be a lathe guy? A machining center guy? A grinder guy? I’m not sure where I’ll eventually land, so until then I’m doing and learning as much as I can, and envisioning what's to come as my career develops.

Regardless of my eventual career path, I’m already in a happy place here at Okuma. I like the idea of taking a raw chunk of material, whether it’s aluminum or steel or whatever, and ending up with a finished part. That’s very interesting to me.

A Completely Different Atmosphere

The other thing I’m enjoying here are the people. Everyone at Okuma is awesome. I’ve worked for competitors in the past, and here it’s just a completely different atmosphere. The way business is conducted it’s just like a family. We work as one with our Okuma colleagues from every department, and our distributors too. We’re all part of the same team, the same family, working toward the same goal. I think this is a pretty good team to be on.

Brad Fitzpatrick is Junior Applications Engineer, Okuma America Corporation.