Aleksynas chose Western because he loved the campus and felt at home—he chose Paper Engineering as his course of study after touring the facility and meeting the faculty. After graduation, Aleksynas worked in the industry for a few years, moving across the country to Seattle and then to Kansas, before deciding he wanted to return home to Michigan.
“When I was at Western, a professor told me the way I wrote and thought was very 'lawyerly,” said Aleksynas. So, while making the decision to move back to Michigan, he also decided to give law school a try.
“I didn’t want to give up being an engineer,” he said. “In Patent law, you must have a technical background, so I knew I would still be able to use my engineering degree.” Since 2007, Aleksynas has been a patent attorney at the Dobrusin Law Firm, P.C. in Pontiac, Michigan. More recently, he was appointed a shareholder of the firm.
Some advice Aleksynas would give to current students or recent graduates stems from his own experiences.
“I only have one client in the paper engineering field,” he says. “I’ve had to learn to adapt for pretty much all of my clients.” He says adaptability is important for an engineer, and that students shouldn’t pigeon hole themselves into one specific area. He knows engineers who now hold managerial and sales positions; even though they may have reinvented their path, they still need that engineering core to get the job done.
At the end of the day, most engineers like to tinker, fix, and figure out how things work. Engineering studieshelp students enhance their inherent curiosity, while teaching them to think critically.
“Regardless of the type of engineering degree… an engineer is an engineer and it is the skills learned from engineering classes that will help solve a problem,” Aleksynas said. He went on to explain that just because a student majors in mechanical engineering, for example, doesn’t mean he or she has to be a mechanical engineer—those skills can be applied across engineering fields.
It’s all in the ability to adapt, according to Aleksynas, “If you’re an engineer, you can figure it out.”