As a provider of various resources for students, the Chabot College STEM Center located in Room 3906 brings in experts of different fields that come in to share their expertise and often explain paths students can take to join these professions and work their way up the ranks.

According to STEM Center Equity Director Gabriel Chaparro,”This was an opportunity for various areas of STEM to see how their areas can work with another. Students see people who look like them in advanced fields of STEM letting them know there is a place for them at the table. The talk is meant to expose students to various work fields that they can eventually pursue for work .” These talks take place every second and fourth Tuesday of the month at noon, and provide a free lunch for all attendees.

On Feb.11, Katharine Murphy Khulusi, Director of Loudspeaker Development at Meyer Sound visited the STEM Center to speak about her career climbing up the ranks and some of the history of Meyer Sound and projects they undergo.

Co-founder John Meyer gained popularity during the “Summer of Love” in 1967, when working at an audio shop in Berkeley, when renowned artist Steve Miller came in which led to Meyer rigging the sound for Miller’s set at the Monterey Pop Festival that year, which in turn led to the creation of Meyer Sound.

Meyer Sound was founded by John and Helen Meyer in 1979 in Berkeley,Ca, and continues to employ engineers, designers, technical support, R&D, marketing, manufacturing, and quality control experts. All of their products are still built at the HQ located in Berkeley, with distributors and offices around the world.

As you might have figured out by now, Meyer Sound specializes in audio technology including speakers, acoustic mapping systems, monitors, subwoofers, and software. From restaurants like Yoshi’s in Oakland, to massive concerts headlined by huge artists like Ed Sheeran, Meyer Sound is renowned as a high-quality innovative company whose ingenuity has lead to over 100 patents.

Katharine, who goes by Katie, started off her presentation giving a little history of how she joined the field and what path she took to become the Director of Loudspeaker Development at Meyer. Katie graduated from the University of Southern California with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a minor in music recording in 2016.

She started at Meyer Sound as an entry level test engineer, but moved into research and development in 2018 where she became a project manager in 2021, and was appointed Director of Loudspeaker Development in 2022.

Some advice that Katie gave to students that look good on resumes were to first get work experience, part time, full time, on campus, off campus, it doesn’t really matter. Get some experience with the work force at an entry level position, preferably in the field you want to start your career in. Community service, volunteer work, etc.

For advice of how to climb ranks into management and leadership positions, Katie stressed two major points, “I tried to be the person that always said yes. I tried to be the person that went and did the kind of crappy jobs that nobody else wanted to do but because somebody had to do it.” she stressed that obviously, you should prioritize your mental and physical health, but if you want to climb ranks,you need to be known as someone who is dependable and willing to do help out even if the task isn’t necessarily a part of your job description.

The second biggest biggest piece of advise Katie gave was to advocate for yourself. Be insistent on your value and try to seize any opportunity you can. “In my specific case, a few kind of gaps in leadership above me ended up happening. And they were more or less open for the taking. So anybody who kind of was ready for a different role or had the hard and soft skills to be able to say, ‘Hey, actually, I think I can do that job’ if you’re willing to give me the opportunity… A lot of where I have gotten in my career was literally just because I was annoying and asked. And again, that can put a lot of toll on your mental health about it. And it scares me still to this day to advocate for myself, but that is literally what I had to do.”

When talking about big projects that she’s worked on with Meyer Sound, she said,”My personal crowning achievement was a line array speaker that we made during the pandemic called Panther. I was one of the principal designers of it. It was my first project as a program manager and a director that I kind of started and completed.” The project, which began at the request of music superstar Ed Sheeran, was finished and shipped to Brussels, Belgium in a mere 8 months in the midst of still very prominent COVID 19 lockdowns and restrictions.

Another prominent project Katie worked on is called the Constellation System, and as she describes it, “Essentially it is a different array of microphones and acoustic treatments and speakers to try to change the acoustics of a room… because there are some rooms that it’s good for people talking, but it actually sounds really bad for music. Or it’s great for an orchestra and nothing else. Or if it’s a restaurant and you can’t hear anything or when there are too many people in it because it is just too noisy.”

Katie went on to explain the different sizes of companies, particularly in the tech industry and how you can choose what size of company you want to work in depending on your own aspirations and values. Small companies or startups often take the most work, and your work-life balance can definitely take the biggest hit, but it can also provide the quickest path of upward mobility to becoming a CEO or making a lot of money depending how successful the company is.

Medium companies which Meyer Sound falls under, don’t typically have the same benefits or as good of pay as large companies do, especially for entry level positions, but as Katie puts it, “You are a member of smaller teams. You get to have a name. You usually know most of your coworkers, and it’s easier to move around and get to different places and explore.”

Katie wrapped up her presentation explaining the differences in managing positions that one could potentially work their way up to. Engineering management, project management, and program management. For engineering management as Katie put it, “You’re managing the engineering day-to-day activities, kind of what your team is doing, your different people. You’re doing some HR stuff. You really are making sure that a team of engineers is working.” Project management will lead certain projects under each branch or team a company has and program management is essentially the higher up branch above projects. For example, if someone was a program manager, they would manage all of the projects that are working with loudspeakers, or software, or acoustics.

In our current political climate in the United States, there’s been a large pushback towards the policies of diversity, equity, and inclusion implemented by the former administration with many people left wondering what hiring practices companies will now abide by. As for Meyer Sound Katie explained,”We want to make sure that as a company, we do not have just one voice that looks like one person of a specific race, of a specific gender, of a specific background. The music industry is really, really diverse and that diversity is part of what makes the industry what it is. And as a manufacturer, if we don’t reflect that as well, some of the innovation that comes from having a really diverse group of people working gets lost.”

STEM Center speaker presentations from this semester as well as the 2024 Spring and Fall semesters can be found on the Chabot College Stem Center web page at https://www.chabotcollege.edu/stem/.