From ESF to R&D at Ahlstrom
In our Real Talk with Real Engineers series, ESF graduate Becca Rock shares what a career in paper engineering actually looks like, from trials in Germany to the R&D lab she never planned on.
When Becca Rock started at SUNY ESF, she pictured a fairly straight line: earn her paper engineering degree, become a process engineer, get to work. Six years later, she is a product development engineer at Ahlstrom, running trials across the globe and building products she once never imagined. Her path is a good reminder that a paper engineering degree does not lock you into one road. It opens up dozens.
Becca graduated from ESF’s Paper Engineering program in 2020. In our Real Talk with Real Engineers series, she sat down to talk about her journey since graduation, what her days look like now, and what she wishes prospective students understood about this field. Here is what she shared.
No two days look the same
Ask Becca what she does day to day and she will give you the honest answer: it depends on the day.
“One of my favorite things about my job is that every day is a little bit different,” she says. In a single recent month, she traveled to Germany to support trials at one of Ahlstrom’s facilities, presented on a product she developed at a technical conference, covered production on the floor back home, and spent stretches of time in the lab and at her desk preparing proposals for a newer project.
Her work connects her with people across the whole operation: quality, production, sales, customers who need technical support, and suppliers developing new raw materials. A big part of her role is evaluating those materials to find options that are more sustainable or more technically efficient. “Day to day really varies,” she says. For someone who likes variety, that is the appeal.
A bigger industry than you would think
If there is one thing Becca wants people to understand, it is this: “What surprised me the most is how expansive and adaptable the paper industry is.”
In school, she learned the foundations and a lot about commodity grades. In the working world, she found her niche in specialty materials, and a whole universe she had not expected. She now helps make advanced filtration media, including media used to purify drinking water, built from raw materials most people would never associate with paper: microglass, synthetic fibers, new chemistries.
“Paper is everywhere, even where you don’t think,” she says. “Someone from the outside might just think books and newspapers, but it’s really everywhere.” It is also, she points out, an industry actively creating alternatives to single-use plastics and constantly innovating to solve new problems as they come up. In her words, it is far more robust than an outsider might guess.
An industry that invests in its people
Becca did not expect how many doors would open early in her career, or how ready the industry would be to open them.
“This industry really wants to invest in young people, if they just take the opportunities that come to them,” she says. That investment has meant international travel and a string of unique projects, all within her first six years out of school. Her advice for making the most of it is refreshingly simple: “If you show an interest and you make yourself available, the opportunities will come, and it’s really important to take them.”
Her advice to students: take the opportunities
That willingness to say yes has shaped Becca’s whole career. She spent all four years of her degree certain she would become a process engineer. Then, senior year, an R&D offer landed on her desk. She thought, why not. “I can always change if I don’t like it,” she remembers reasoning. “And it’s turned out to be an extremely rewarding career path for me.”
The same held true for parts of the job she never expected to enjoy, like working directly with customers. Her takeaway for anyone considering the field is to stay open. “Even if you think you won’t like something, you never know until you try. Always push yourself,” she says. “It’s a big industry. There’s a lot of different roles within it. So why not try everything and see what you really like the most and what you’re good at?”
Two internships were where a lot of that clarity came from. They are how she discovered that specialty materials were the work she loved. Her one-line version of all of it: take the opportunities.
The reward on the other side
Becca is the first to say the coursework is demanding. She is also quick to say it is worth it. “For however structured and difficult the classes and the content might be, there’s significant reward on the other side,” she says.
More than anything, she is grateful she found the program at all. “I really care about this program, and I really care about the paper industry. I think it’s a little underrated, honestly,” she says. “I’m grateful to have found the program at ESF. I don’t know what I’d be doing if I wasn’t doing this.”
If Becca’s story sounds like the kind of future you want, it can start the same place hers did. Explore the Paper Engineering program at SUNY ESF, and reach out to SPPF to learn about the grants and scholarships that can help you get there. There is a lot of road ahead. See where it takes you.
