Rachel Sklar is a commercialization engineer at PepsiCo. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Cooper Union in chemical engineering. An alumna of my school, I had the privilege of hearing her speak in 2020, and I followed up with an interview on March 31, 2021.
When I first heard you speak, I thought your job sounded really fun. What do you do on a typical day?
It's actually not a straightforward answer. My favorite thing about my job is that I don't do the same thing every single day. I'm part of the commercialization engineering team within research and development (R&D). When the marketing or brand team comes up with a fantastic idea, they ask R&D to make the product. Then, the product developers, who are usually food scientists, start to develop the formula. They work in the lab in small beakers, very chem-lab style. Then it is my team's job to take what is working on a small scale and convert it so it can be scaled up and eventually manufactured on a huge, commercial scale. We have to make sure that we produce it in the right plant based on the plant’s capabilities.
I spend my time split between several different settings, one being a lab, where we’re working with two-liter beakers. Then, in the middle step, we work with 50-to-150 gallon sized tanks in a pilot plant, which is a small scale manufacturing plant used just for R&D. In the production plants, we’re working with 7000 gallon sized tanks. Pre-COVID days, people on my team would actually fly out to the different plants to test the products or processes. I also sit at a desk sometimes and attend a lot of meetings. In terms of settings, it's kind of a bit all over the place.
Was chemical engineering something you always wanted to do? What made you decide that this was the field you wanted to go into?
I originally wanted to be an architect, and I formed an architecture and design elective in high school. If you had an idea and 10 others signed up to say that they were interested, too, the school would organize it. Ultimately, I remember being a little frustrated that my high school architecture class wasn't as math and physics heavy as I would have wanted, so I started to think about engineering.
I don't know about you, but in high school, I thought engineers only build bridges, though those are really civil engineers. I also loved chemistry, so I thought maybe I should be a chemical engineer. I think that's the reason why a lot of people become chemical engineers, and it's honestly not the best reason. It's not a hard science, it's an application of chemistry, the same way that biomedical engineering is different from regular biology.
As a high school senior I applied to Cooper Union, which requires that you select a specific major, so I applied as a chemical engineering major. That sent me on a specific trajectory, which worked for me, because I didn’t go through a crisis in college of changing my major four times, which is what a lot of my friends at liberal arts colleges did. On the flip side, if I decided that I didn’t want to study engineering anymore, I would have had to switch schools, but I never stopped to rethink becoming a chemical engineer once I was already in Cooper.
One thing that's really awesome about chemical engineering is that you can do so many things with it. You can work in the food industry, which is what I do, but you can also work in the pharmaceutical industry, the biotech field, the oil industry, or you can work in regular chemicals, like cleaning products. You can also go into finance, but you're not really using engineering there; you're just using your data analysis skills. I've always viewed chemical engineering as something that opens doors.
I interned for two summers at a semiconductor company where I worked in the lab and learned a lot. I really enjoyed it, but I felt that it was a little antisocial, which I didn't like personally, but it was a very good experience. I also didn't like that if you say, “I work with semiconductors,” everybody's eyes glaze over!
I got an internship with Pepsi the following summer, and when I told people I worked for Pepsi, everyone got so excited. I like going grocery shopping and noticing where the Pepsi products are on the shelves relative to the Coke products. There's something that's very fun and exciting about creating tangible products that I see in everyday life, and that other people also see and recognize.
Do you have a favorite project that you've gotten to work on at Pepsi?
I would say there are two projects that I'm working on that I very much enjoy, and for very different reasons.
One is a Starbucks product. Pepsi has a partnership with Starbucks, where Pepsi does the R&D, product development, and process development for the bottled and canned Starbucks drinks. I enjoy working on Starbucks, since I'm a big coffee drinker! Another part of why I enjoy this specific project so much is because it's working with dairy, which is more complicated from a chemistry standpoint, since the chemistry of dairy and proteins is totally different than just working on soda. The first time we tried to scale this out to a large scale, after a certain step in the process, we put it in a refrigerator tank overnight. The next morning, we came back and we tried to pump it to the next tank, but it was literally like pudding and you couldn't pump it. The people who were helping us with it needed to get shovels and scoop out this mixture of ingredients! It’s a real engineering challenge to make sure that whatever mixture we make, whether it's an “in between” stage or a finished product, needs to be able to flow through the pipes when it gets to a manufacturing plant.
There's a different project that I'm working on, which is not a product project. I'm working on improving a model and simulation of a specific thermal process, which is a heat treatment that we use on beverages to sterilize them. We do this so that it's food safe, and you don't need to be concerned that you get sick from drinking it. I've been working to try and make this model and simulation a bit better. It’s not for a specific product, so it's less interesting. On the flip side, modeling and simulation is the direction of the future, so it's cool to be creating something that's ultimately going to be used as a tool to work for all products.
Do you typically work on your own or as a part of a team, and if you do, do you have any advice for working with others?
On my team of commercialization engineers, we have 16 people who sit in the Westchester office, plus 10 people in Chicago and counterparts in a lot of other locations. I also work with cross functional product-type teams. On each product that's being developed, we have a product developer/food scientist working in the lab, a process engineer (which is me), a project manager, someone from sensory who runs different consumer tests to make sure that we made the right taste profile, and someone from regulatory to make sure that everything that's going into a product is not just food-safe, but also compliant with that country's regulations. Most of them are not engineers, and everyone has different working styles, which sometimes becomes a challenge. The biggest challenge on a personal level that I've had is that a lot revolves around the product developer (at least on an R&D level) and around marketing. The engineer plays more of a support role, and communicating in a timely way is critical to the success of the project. One of the best pieces of advice that my first manager gave me is that it’s important to become friends with your colleagues, especially the product developers. If they're your friends, you can schmooze, and through organic conversation you can get looped in earlier about changes, you can work more efficiently, you can avoid having to redo work, and the project will be more successful.
Do you have any advice for young women who want to go into STEM?
I would say that just because you don't know anybody with a specific career does not mean you shouldn’t pursue that career. I knew very few people from my community who worked in the food industry, especially in research and development. If something seems interesting, try to learn more about it and gain as many experiences as you can at your age. Don’t be afraid to try something new.
I never expected to land in the food industry. Pepsi did on-campus recruitment at Cooper, and, being a good student, I showed up with my resume, made small talk, asked the questions I was supposed to, and I got a job offer. It wasn't a plan that I had thought out. If something different like this falls into your lap, take advantage!
I would also say that I have found that hands-on experience, such as shadowing a chemical engineer for a week or two, or doing an intern-type project for a chemical engineer, is often more helpful than academic classes. I think hands-on experience is the best way to learn about anything, not just from an engineering standpoint.
So I noticed that you only received a bachelor’s degree. Do you feel that just having a bachelor’s is enough, or do you think that it is easier to get opportunities and succeed in your field with a higher degree?
That's a really good question. The first thing that I would say is that if you plan on going into academia, then you definitely need a master's degree, if not a PhD. I figured out early on, however, that I wanted to work in an industry, so I wouldn’t necessarily need a PhD. Most engineering jobs don't require a master's, although they’re helpful. I have actually been looking into starting a master's program and thinking about whether to go back to school full time, or whether to do some sort of part-time program at night while working at Pepsi. It’s on my radar, but not because I think it's integral to my success. I look around at my team at work, and the majority of them don't have a master's degree. I see graduate school as an opportunity to pivot or specialize in an industry. I will be looking into getting a master's in food science, for instance, if I want to stay in the food industry, rather than one in chemical engineering. For chemical engineering, it's less useful to get the same degree and more useful to build on your foundational knowledge.
Some personal takeaways:
After I had heard Ms. Sklar speak to my school, I knew that her job sounded fascinating, and I was right! I am really glad that I got to learn even more about it.
I have always known that I enjoy hands-on projects more than others, so a job in which I am working with my hands some of the time is of interest to me. The balance of desk work and lab work that she has seems like the perfect combination.
I really appreciated getting to hear and receive advice from someone who came from the same background and high school as me. Sometimes it can be hard to imagine myself in a position similar to Ms. Sklar, but having spoken to her, it made me realize that I can achieve similar things.
So far, I’ve been more drawn to physics, but maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to rule out chemistry.
I looked into Cooper Union as a possibility for me, but the truth is, I don’t want to limit myself to such a focused program. Although I’d like to be immersed in STEM subjects and learn from amazing teachers, I’d like to be able to take humanities courses, too, and make friends with diverse views, who are from other programs. I think that’s part of the college experience.
Ms. Sklar was incredibly passionate about her job and shared funny and entertaining stories. I feel myself getting excited and animated when I retell those stories or share elements of my research and my blog with others. Communicating science concepts–both writing about and talking about science and engineering–may be a path for me to explore more down the road.
Super interesting! 👏👏👏👏