What is your role and how long have you worked at KFI?

My name is Tanya Jacobs and I’m a Senior Design Engineer. I have worked at Trienda for 7 years.

What sparked your interest in becoming a design engineer?

I grew up on a farm and watched my dad make/fix a lot of things around the farm out of “junk” he had laying around. Like my dad, I always liked to figure out how things worked and how to make them work better.

What’s your favorite thing about working at KFI?

I like the people I work with. They are friendly and willing to help each other in order to get the job done. I also really like my job in engineering designing thermoformed parts, but my friends and co-workers at KFI are really what makes it enjoyable.

Do you have a project that you’ve recently worked on that you feel proud of?

I recently finished a sample of a full pack set for a steering gear. I designed the tray, pallet, and cover for the steering gear product. It was a tricky design because the steering gear has a shaft with a large gasket sticking out of it and the shaft needed to point vertically in the tray. One of the reasons people like this design is because you can get another full layer of parts in the pack by using the custom pallet and cover with the tray.

As a woman in the engineering field, what are some of the ways you feel women impact the field in positive ways.

This is a hard question for me to answer, because I haven’t really thought of myself as being different than any other engineer just because I’m a woman. There is no doubt that there are not a lot of women who pursue engineering, but I think if someone is interested in math, science, and engineering they should be encouraged to pursue it, regardless of who they are. I think everyone has different experiences in life, and those experiences can give you a different perspective on things. In engineering, it can be beneficial to have multiple people looking at/working on a project, because each person can bring their own unique ideas to the table.