Meet Ocean Explorer Brady Hogg!

OET proudly welcomes Brady Hogg to the Corps of Exploration as part of the Science & Engineering Internship Program. This internship program supports community college, undergraduate, and graduate students in building professional workforce experience and exploring STEAM-related careers that connect to research themes like robotics, ocean science, education, and exploration. Brady is joining E/V Nautilus for our NA182 expedition as an ROV engineering intern.

We sat with Brady to learn more about his experience at sea and the path that led him to Nautilus.

Describe your role with OET.

I am the ROV Pilot and Engineering Intern aboard NA 182. My responsibilities include driving the ROVs, monitoring the health of the vehicles, certifying their seaworthiness before each dive, and making all necessary repairs and upgrades needed on the expedition. What that looks like is following checklists in detail, inspecting the chassis, electronics, hydraulics and various pieces of equipment. When issues do present themselves, which is more often than you may think, it's the Pilots job to assess and understand the problem, come up with potential solutions and weigh their pros and cons, then implement them on the ship. Sometimes we don't get the luxury of being on the ship when a problem presents itself, and we have to troubleshoot the issue thousands of meters away from where the problem might be. "Pilot" doesn't just mean we are the ones flying the machines, but also inspecting, repairing, modifying, upgrading and documenting.

Can you tell us a little about your background? What influenced you as a child?

Currently, I am a mechanical engineering student, and I started engineering back in high school with my robotics team, FRC team 2046, Bear Metal. That opportunity and the incredible people I worked with gave me a massive head start in engineering and set in motion the rest. I have gotten so many technical opportunities since, like being a  part time CNC machinist, Mechanical Lead for my college's Autonomous Underwater Vehicle team, a manufacturing engineering intern building fighter jet engine components, a metrology research intern for the Office of Naval Research, an R&D intern for an Ag-tech company and most recently this! As a kid and especially in high school I was influenced heavily by my high school's FRC team, where I got to learn CNC machining, mechanical design, CAD and leadership at a young age.

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

For the longest time I did not know. I always had a liking for math and liked getting my hands dirty working on complex systems. I started working on cars as a young teenager and I started to get the idea that I wanted to work with machinery in some way. But once I learned about engineering where you are really able to deeply understand the genius of everything around you, and I immediately fell in love.

What would you consider to be your greatest challenge entering this field?

You need to always be learning and growing. To me that's the fun part of the job, but always pushing yourself to do better and more can be exhausting, and at times it's hard to find drive through the day to day. I absolutely have experienced burnout and burnout that has set me back pretty significantly, but you must have perseverance to not let that define you, and the confidence to know you'll bounce back.

Do you have any advice for someone looking to follow a similar path?

Find good mentors. I guarantee that no matter what it is you want to do in life somebody else has spent their life doing just that or something very similar. Finding those people and making those connections early in life will pay dividends later. For engineering specifically, high school robotics clubs usually have excellent mentors and in college get to know the upperclassmen in club leadership.

What's next for your ocean studies and career?

Whatever opportunity I can grab next! I am close to graduating with my bachelors in mechanical engineering, and the next step might be grad school, it might be working directly in industry on design or manufacturing work, it may be as a ROV contractor or a combination of all of them. Each day I feel my answer would change as it's all very exciting to me, so I'll see where the currents take me!