Our Spotlight on Super series highlights the SRC team members who help keep the company a great a place to work and grow. For this installment, we sat down Raul Babilonia, a sales application engineer at our Arizona Division who joined the team earlier this year.
Q: First off, where are you from originally? Where’s home?
RB: I was born in Puerto Rico. I lived there until I was about four or five, then I moved to the states with my older brother and my mom. We ended up in Northern New Jersey, lived there for 11 years before I moved upstate to go to high school before heading over to Buffalo for college.
Q: How did you come to work for SRC? What’s the story there?
RB: Before SRC I was working in a similar role for a large HVAC OEM in upstate New York. The work was pretty similar to what I do here, but it was at the system level, where here it’s down at the heat exchanger level. But I was looking to make a change and move from New York, and I thought it wouldn’t make much sense for me to stay in that role if all my customers were still going to be back in New York.
Q: What is the day-to-day like in your role? What sort of things do you work on?
RB: Right now, I’m managing two of our bigger accounts, so a lot of what I do on a daily basis is coordinating with the purchasing and engineering teams at those customers and making sure we’re supplying them with everything they need. Sometimes it’s as simple as them sending me a drawing and us getting the job scheduled and delivered.
Other times, especially for new designs, there’s a lot more that goes into it – we’ll work with our drafting team to get it designed up, then make sure it’s all entered into our system properly, things like that. I also do quite a bit of coordination with our Virginia and Minnesota Divisions, since a few of the accounts I work on are shared between the three of us.
Q: Where does your passion for working on more hands-on, technical projects come from? Have you always had an interest in how things work?
RB: Definitely. I love being hands on. I’m not the kind of guy who can read a paper and learn something, I like jumping right in and, for me, I think that’s how I learn the best, too. And my dad is a civil engineer who works in construction and growing up I always knew I wanted to do something technical. And I grew up with a single mom, so it was just me and my older brother, and I kind of felt like as the ‘man of the house’ that I should be able to fix things and keep things working.
And when I got to college, I was really interested in robotics at first, and I took a robotics lab, and it was fun, but I learned that robotics weren’t necessarily my passion. So, I was planning what classes I was going to take and I saw heat transfer, which really intrigued me. I think it’s so interesting that such a simple concept like the transfer of heat has such a big impact on things around us – from the jackets we wear to A/C systems, it’s just something I was interested in. And I was more interested in the design side of things, too and I’m able to design things in my role here.
Q: As somebody who recently went through the interviewing process and learned more about SRC, has the job been what you hoped it would be so far? And what do you like about working here?
RB: It’s funny, when another one of our engineers was interviewing recently and walking around the office and she asked me what it was like to be new since I was the newest person here. I told her – and I’ll tell anyone – everyone says “culture, culture, culture,” but it really does feel like friends working together here. There’s an open door policy and people are happy to help you out when they can.
Q: What about when you’re not at work? How do you like to spend your time?
RB: I’m big on the gym and fitness, and make sure I’m keeping my body going. I love cooking, too. I’ll try new recipes for dinner if I’m not feeling lazy that night – steaks, pastas, all that. I’ve been making Korean food a lot lately, especially bulgogi – I’ve been trying to perfect my recipe for that. I’m trying to branch out more and might try baking. Besides that I love dancing – dancing is huge in Puerto Rico and I grew up doing it – salsa, merengue, bachata all that type of stuff.
If you’d like to know more about working at SRC, be sure to stop by our Careers Homepage to learn more about who we are, what we make, and where we work. And stop by our job listings page to see our open positions. Manufacturing experience is preferred, but not required. If you’ve got a positive attitude and a good work ethic, we’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading.
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