Tech Outlook with Brian Rashap, CNM Ingenuity
The guest on episode 12 of the Tech Outlook podcast is Brian Rashap, who is an Internet of Things and Quantum educator for CNM Ingenuity.
He teaches the Internet of Things 10-week boot camp — the next course starts next month — and he is also developing a Quantum program to build a local workforce of technicians who can work in quantum computing. We’ll get into details of both programs in the episode.
Here is a sample of the conversation that has been edited. The Tech Outlook podcast comes out Monday afternoon and is available on YouTube, SoundCloud, iTunes and Spotify.
Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?
“I came to New Mexico almost 30 years ago ... I remember getting a phone call from Intel here, asking me if I wanted to pursue a job at the plant in Rio Rancho. They asked me what I knew about Albuquerque. And at that time, I told them I knew that Bugs Bunny made a wrong turn here. And I knew about hot air balloons. But I wanted to learn more. My wife and I moved out here in the mid 90s and both of us were engineers at the Intel facility. I spent a little over two decades in various jobs here, locally, at Intel. And then my last few years of my Intel career I was responsible for Intel’s facilities across the U.S. and Canada. So we got an opportunity to see a broader spectrum of things. In all honesty, I got tired of being on an airplane seat and decided it was time to just be here. I left Intel in 2019.
During my education, I always wanted to teach. And so when I left Intel, I was very fortunate to come across this opportunity at CNM to really, in some way, fulfill my lifelong dream of being a teacher.”
And you teach the Internet of Things boot camp. Can you tell what that is?
“The Internet of Things is a term that often doesn’t make a lot of sense to people. You can really think of Internet of Things as smart, connected devices and you have many of them in your in your home. You might have a doorbell that has a little camera that can detect if someone’s bringing a package to your door, you have a smart thermostat that optimizes the temperature control in your house, you may have smart irrigation that looks at the weather forecast and decides whether or not you should water your plants or not. All of these are smart, connected devices. That would be the Internet of Things. We developed the Internet of Things boot camp as a way to help individuals get started in that industry, and particularly individuals that a two-year program just didn’t fit their needs of their life. And so the boot camp is part of CNM Ingenuity’s Deep Dive program, they’re 10- to 12-week immersive training. So I get students 40 hours a week for 10 weeks, almost 400 hours. And the students go through and they learn a variety of things. They learn how to program, they learn how to do electronics design, they learn 3D printing, 3D modeling, rapid prototyping, a variety of skills that prepare them to go into jobs where either they’re creating the smart connected devices, or using the smart connected devices to make something better, say a manufacturing process.
Ten weeks doesn’t sound like a long time to become knowledgeable on the hightech skills?
“First and foremost, which is very important, is that we don’t require any prerequisites for the students. You don’t need to have a science background or a programming background. I tell individuals that are looking at our Internet of Things class, there’s really two things that you need to know: You need to know what a mouse is on your computer. And if you pull out your phone, if you can divide, then we’ll teach you everything else. And it does seem like starting from that point, ‘How can you get into a tech job in 10 weeks?’ Seems like a stretch. But because we’re doing it in this immersive environment where you learn maybe the theory of something, and then you’re immediately applying it. There’s a lot of lecturing, there’s a lot of doing homework, there’s a lot of book work. And maybe there’s a lab class that’s mostly handson doing work with yourself and your peers. You get a little bit of instruction, you apply it, you get more instruction, apply it, and we literally do that over and over again for the 50 days throughout the course. It’s an intense environment. Boot camp makes you think like a military boot camp. And it’s the mental equivalent.
We also wanted to talk about this quantum boot camp because you’re developing this quantum boot camp that will be a new addition to the CNM Ingenuity boot camp programs. Can you explain what quantum computing is?
“When we think about our portfolio of trainings that we have, we’re always looking into the local economy and an industry and asking, ‘what’s next?’ ‘What do we need to prepare the workforce for?’ And so CNM is really looking toward the future, looking for what’s on the horizon, particularly in technology, looking for opportunities where New Mexico and really differentiate itself. And quantum computing or quantum information systems is one of those areas.
“We’re all familiar with conventional computers, you have word processors or spreadsheets, even big data of keeping track of records and bank statements, and all that type of stuff works phenomenally well in conventional computers. But there are a set of problems that conventional computers, even though they are fast, still take a long time to solve. And so a few examples: If you’re a health care company, or a pharmaceutical company, developing new drugs, the process these days is to kind of simulate the drug and its interaction with different things in the human body. And what they do is create a 3D model of the of drug molecule, and they simulate how it would interact with, let’s say, a virus. As you might imagine, it’s a very slow process, I have to change the drug, I changed a molecule I tested, I changed something I tested. Quantum computing has the possibility of essentially testing all the different variations all at the same time. So it can speed up problems like that.”
It is pretty amazing that you’re talking about very complicated theories and processes. And the prerequisite is to know how to use a mouse and a calculator.
“Exactly. And that’s by design. Because one of the things that I have found is there are so many people that are self-selecting out of the high-tech workforce. ‘I wasn’t good in science, I’m not good at math, I didn’t have this experience.’ And so really what’s fundamental to the design of our courses is to really reduce all those barriers to entry and to show everyone that there is a place for them in the technological future of the country. And not everyone’s going to choose it. But for those who want to go down that path, we’ve really just stripped away everything that can be in their way, and tried to find a great path that can show that, honestly, literally anyone can be involved in our high-tech economy.”