Rene Diaz-Rocha
English 21007 Section L
October 11, 2018
Transcending Chemical Engineering Through Technical Writing:
Lessons of Mary K Lynch to Evolve as a Chemical Engineer
“My attitude towards life is love the job you are in. And if you don’t love it, don’t leave it, just remake it to be the job you want.” Mary K Lynch, Senior Engineering Instructor at Con Edison of New York, gave me this advice. She encouraged me to apply all my skills to realize my dreams through the career I chose. She is also the Committee Chair of the New York, NY metro section of The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), which is the largest network of chemical engineers in the world. I was able to contact her using her email address posted in the New York leadership website of AIChE. I requested to meet with her for an informational interview. I met with Mrs. Lynch in the Con Edison learning center at 43-82 Vernon Blvd, Long Island City, NY. I performed the interview in room 110, a classroom where she teaches steam production and distribution. Her classroom shows all the equipment and associated fittings that are involved in the movement of steam. Her day as the senior instructor at Con Edison involves teaching chemistry courses pertaining to water chemistry, water purification, and stack emission monitoring equipment. She teaches both the chemical engineers, the operators, the chemical professionals that supervise the chemical engineers, and the technical managers. During our interview, she emphasized the importance of technical writing in her position, because she must update hundreds of pages per semester of curriculum materials. The way she phrased it was: “updating the course books is, I think, technical writing’s purest form.” She is also responsible for writing detailed reports explaining to upper management what the students are learning. She makes exceptional use of technical writing as an instructor.
Mrs. Lynch education at Cooper Union prepared her well for the future. She learned how to facilitate group work through many laboratory group projects. She developed presentation and speaking skills, crucial for any job. She also gained hands-on chemical engineering experience in her senior class on unit separations, which was a group laboratory class with engineering equipment, such as a distillation tower, and filter presses. Upon graduation, finding job a chemical engineering job was difficult. Her first job was at the U.S. Army in the Picaitinny Arssenal, New Jersey, as a value engineer. She took about an hour drive to get there from New York. The commute was unappealing, but the job was so hard to find, she felt fortunate to have it. Her job was to facilitate and organize value reviews. She put together a team of subject matter experts and they evaluated U.S. Army projects that were three quarters completed in the design phase. The army trained her on how to facilitate technical group discussions. She conducted seminars around the country, where her team would collectively perform a value analysis of very large military projects. At each step her team maximized and optimized the value of munition production projects. She expressed great joy when she described her work subject: “munitions production is chemistry, because we have propellants that are chemicals, we have explosives that are chemicals, it was all chemistry and it was my passion.” Technical writing was imperative as a value engineer. As she explained, her job was to “translate something technical into regular speech”. As a value engineer, she was responsible for writing the final reports, which included information from a group of experts that participated in a week-long collective evaluation of a project. She had to be able to write a report that included information from experts in various disciplines such as pipping and risk reduction. She wrote concise but thorough reports, that other officers in the army, without scientific background, could understand. As she explained, “technical writing is rewriting things that are of a highly technical matter for some particular discipline and taking that information and making it understandable to a more general population”
After Mrs. Lynch’s first daughter was born, she left the U.S. Army after two years of service. She didn’t want to travel extensively. She was hired by Con Edison of New York. There she had the following job titles: Engineer for the Technical Service Lab, Lubrication Engineer, Expert Systems Project Manager, Chemical Information System Program Manager, Power Plant Chemical Specialist, Steam Purity Program Manager, Associate Engineer for the General Lab, and Assistant Engineer in Power Generation. She became an expert in a broad range of disciplines, and technical writing was always part of all of them. One example of her technical writing was her development of The Chemist Procedure Handbook over the course of 3 years. The Station Chemist Procedure Handbook was used for almost 20 years as the set of guidelines for chemical procedures at Con Edison. Working at the central laboratory at Con Edison, she noticed inconsistencies in the chemical processes and techniques at the nine smaller laboratories in each power plant. These discrepancies occurred because the previous handbook didn’t include improvements in chemical detection that had been developed and it included many reagents that were carcinogenic or toxic in its procedures. She visited all the different stations and witnessed how each lab was doing each test and took notes. She conducted research of standard methods by established authorities such as the Environmental Protection Agency. She also researched approved methods in the American Society for Testing and Materials series of procedures and methodologies. She researched and referenced instrumentation manuals from Hack Instruments & Industries Inc. and Perkin Elmer (both chemical instrumentation providers). Finally, she condensed and simplified all the information needed for the relevant procedures carried out in Con Edison into a book of over 400 pages, which includes 50 to 60 procedures. Each section lists safety precautions, reagents, the process in a sequential order, calculations, graphs, and visual aids that each procedure required. The development of this book demonstrates she went above and beyond the job description of a chemical engineer. In many ways she set the standards of leadership at Con Ed through technical writing.
In 1995 Mrs. Lynch moved with her family to Atlanta because her husband’s job was relocated there. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find any power plant or manufacturing job in Atlanta for a chemical engineer. She rewrote her resume to highlight her technical writing skills. She found a job as a technical writer for Gulliver Ritchie and Associates Inc. production company. She wrote training materials for the repair of General Electric locomotive engines. She was qualified to do this because of her experience with General electric gas turbines, her
mechanical engineering training at Con Edison, and her technical writing skills. Despite the lack of chemical engineering jobs in Atlanta, her technical writing skills gave her strong leverage and flexibility in marketing herself. In many ways she evolved in the work force and was able to adapt to her circumstances. In 2002 Mrs. Lynch returned to New York to work at Con Edison. Today she is one of the most talented and
knowledgeable instructors to ever worked there. She showed me that a chemical engineer can connect people across different disciplines, change the structure of an entire company, find unconventional job opportunities, and become more than his or her job description through proficient use of technical writing. I am very grateful to her for sharing all these lessons with me. She has the mind of an engineer, the heart of a chemist, and the soul of a teacher.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication license.
