Work has its ups and downs. These days, it has been more down than up. Part of my job is to improve the manufacturing of a gel that the customer uses in DNA sequencing and fragment analysis. What makes my job hard is a push from management to fix the problems that have been building up for years and ignored, working in a lab that is not set up for scale-up work or pilot plants, working in a company environment in which capital expenditures are under tight control, and my limited experience in process engineering. I would like to buy all these cool tools and thoroughly study the gel in the lab; I am blocked by a limit on capital expenditures and red tape. I guess this provides me with an opportunity to be extra creative, but that usually leads to things being haphazardly thrown together and usually not for the best interest of the customers.

What I do enjoy is the "management" portion of Supply Chain Management (also part of my job). I work with 10-20 people from different departments to set up purchasing, planning, shipping, quality control, validation tests, and data analysis of new product introductions. I enjoy learning what each of the different departments has to offer, especially the transportation department's knowledge of the regulations on hazardous materials and all the different codes. I don't enjoy managing people as much as managing the material flow and the schedule. I guess I like managing "things" rather than "people."