Better Together: Live @ 2025 Student Summit - Ep. 1 "Papermaking is a Miracle"

This episode was recorded on-site at TAPPI's 2025 Student Summit in St. Petersburg, FL. More than 300 attendees—including pulp and paper engineering students from 13 different universities—enjoyed panel discussions, a Career Fair, and Engineering Challenge, and so much more. We asked students to "take the mic" to host their own interviews and share their unique voices.

First up, Western Michigan University students Parker Langellier and Toby Archer interview Dr. Med Byrd, Professor and Undergraduate Coordinator for the Paper Science and Engineering program at North Carolina State University.  "The paper process is very unique, very specific, and—let's face it—delightfully funky," Dr. Byrd tells our hosts, as they explore what makes pulp and paper such an amazing career choice.

Next, veteran Student Summiteers Tanner Stogner and Michael Reuss interview first-time Summit attendees Conyers Preveaux and Gavin Knight. All four are students at Auburn University in Auburn, AL. As one student comments, "You see familiar faces all around. It's really nice that we have 300 people here and we all want the same thing: to grow our industry."

This is the first of two episodes hosted by student volunteers at the 2025 Student Summit. Make sure to Subscribe to Better Together so you won't miss the next episode!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Thanks for tuning in to Better Together, the Paper 360 Podcast. I'm Jan Bodilari, editor of Paper 360, and your usual host. But we've got something really special for you today. This is the first of two episodes recorded on site at TAPI's 2025 Student Summit. This annual event brings together hundreds of students, educators, industry professionals for panel discussions, a career fair, networking, and more. In this episode, we will first welcome guest hosts Parker Langelier and Toby Archer, two paper engineering students from Western Michigan University, and their guest, Dr. Med Byrd, professor and undergraduate coordinator for the Paper Science and Engineering Program at North Carolina State University. Next, we'll turn things over to four talented students from the Pulp and Paper Engineering Program at Auburn University in Alabama, as Tanner Stogner, Michael Roost, Konyers Preval, and Gavin Knight discuss the Student Summit experience. I'm sure you'll enjoy our student hosts for this energetic episode of Better Together.

SPEAKER_08 1:20

This is uh the side note at uh Student Summit. Um I'm Parker Langelier. I'm Toby Archer. Uh we're both from Western Michigan University, and we have a very special guest today. Uh, would you like to introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_03 1:32

Yep, I'm Dr. Mid Byrd, and I am a teaching professor at North Carolina State University in the paper science and engineering program.

SPEAKER_08 1:39

Very good. Yeah, and thanks for giving us your time. We really appreciate having you here. And it's uh it I've been to this is my third student summit, uh, so it's it's a great time to see you every year and uh get to know you guys. So it's been a really great relationship. It's been awesome to meet you guys. So um can you just start uh and tell us a little bit about yourself? Uh outside of paper, where'd you where'd you start in life and uh we'll go from there?

SPEAKER_03 2:00

Uh I'm from North Carolina, rural North Carolina, and uh went to NC State in Engineering because it's all we could afford. And uh it was a great value back then, it still is. Went in chemical engineering, but uh was given the opportunity to add pulp and paper with an enticement. I was baited in with a scholarship, and it worked, and I liked it a lot. And so I did a dual degree in chemical engineering and paper science and engineering or pulp and paper technology. And so the rest, as they say, is history.

SPEAKER_07 2:31

Yeah, I think we're we were all baited in by that scholarship.

SPEAKER_08 2:34

It got trapped. It's enticing, the placement and the the money.

SPEAKER_03 2:41

And then I I feel like that's kind of how it was for me, and then the the science of it hooked me and all the intricacies and and well chemical engineering is so diffuse and unspecific, and paper, you know exactly what you're converting. It's a magical conversion process. So it really makes the engineering part come alive. I tell students if you do the dual degree, you'll become a much better chemical engineer because once you can make paper, you can make anything.

SPEAKER_08 3:07

So what's uh what's one thing that um so you've moved into professorship now, and um you've got a great relationship with students from talking to the other NC state people. Um so what's one benefit that you like you can get from a paper degree as opposed to just a chemical engineering degree moving into the paper industry? I know a lot of great chemical engineers who've gone into industry and they do a great job in the paper in the paper industry, but uh what are some of the benefits that you get from the paper engineering degree specifically?

SPEAKER_03 3:35

Well, the reason a lot of the paper programs were created was that um the paper process is very unique, very specific, and let's face it, delightfully funky. And turning biomass into paper is unlike any other process. So if you take a chemical engineer who's probably received very broad training, maybe a little something specific, but all focused on petro, right? Distillation, separation, right? And so you take and hire them in an integrated paper mill, and for the first two years, they don't know which end is up, right? So the paper industry says we'd like to get those two years. So we'll give some money, start up a program, and give you the chemical engineering part and the paper part. And so now when you hit the ground, you hit the ground running and you are contributing to the bottom line from day one. And that's the value proposition. That's why the paper schools were started. If it wasn't valuable, we'd all be in chemical engineering.

SPEAKER_07 4:32

I definitely enjoy the like getting into the paper stuff. And I I've worked with some chemical engineers and they're like, yeah, it took me a second to get there. And I'm telling them stuff that I learned in my first year, even though I'm not extra expert on it. They're like, oh, that's interesting how that works.

SPEAKER_03 4:48

Yeah, if you don't you get in the mail and they start talking about kappa number, you don't know the difference between that and grape jam, right?

SPEAKER_08 4:54

Kappa T, something.

SPEAKER_03 4:55

Yeah, something.

SPEAKER_08 4:56

Yeah, you're unknown at that point. Hard, soft, no idea. Yeah. I remember when I first walked into a pulp mill, I hadn't spent a lot of time there, and and I just got a quick tour, and uh I was just walking around all their all the towers were everywhere, and I was, you know, didn't know what a dwell time meant or why why I cared.

SPEAKER_03 5:13

So uh But you knew you were in a wonderland. You were in a chemical engineering wonderland. I'll never forget that first time walking in for my first internship, and I said, Oh my gosh, look at this. I said, I get to play with this and they're gonna pay me.

unknown 5:29

No.

SPEAKER_03 5:30

I still feel that way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 5:32

And that's and so I have a little bit more experience on the paper machine side. Can you speak to some of the the pulp mill side? Because I I feel like a lot of the chemical engineers around, that's some of the equipment they're more familiar with in the sense that it has some of those more typical unit operations in that in that back end of the mill. Uh and some of us people who focus on paper, sometimes we focus on the front end of the mill and we're like, they just do their thing back there and they ship us whatever we need. Can you speak to that a little bit?

SPEAKER_03 5:59

Well, there's two miracles we pull off every day. One is the pulp mill, one's the paper mill. They each have a different set of challenges. So you think about what goes on in the pulp mill, they're bringing in this sustainably grown, beautiful, but maddeningly non-uniform raw material wood. And then they're asked to bring one part of it, the cellulose, isolate it, without destroying the rest of it. And so they work very hard to do that. And then they generate all these byproducts and they say, well, we're not gonna throw those away. We're gonna incinerate them and make all the steam we need, and by golly, anywhere from a quarter to more than all the electricity we need. And oh, by the way, the same process regenerates most of our chemicals. So it's uh it's the back end of the mill's where the heart of the process is. It's what makes the mill, I think it's 97% efficient. There's very little that leaves a pulp and paper mill except for products, byproducts, water vapor, effluent, right, and some incredibly good bioelectricity. So it's it's a different kind of miracle. Then the paper folks, they have a whole different miracle. And they have to take these millions and millions of useless fibers and they have to cobble it together into an engineered structure that meets a very demanding spec for a customer, and that is not easy. So, and then of course they sit there all day long and fight like cats and dogs because they have completely different uh miracles they have to pull off.

SPEAKER_08 7:34

In some ways, I think of theirs as a miracle of organization. There's all these hoops to jump through and things to juggle, and you drop one ball and it all comes crumbling down. So making sure that all the all the things are are teetered on the top of the hill, as it were, and making sure the ball doesn't roll off to the left or off to the right. Um, you know, I I just think of of so many things like uh your jet-to-wire ratio and and things like that, and you know how close you are to be an isoelectric. I I love the you know, sometimes painting those lines of you know, you go too far one direction and suddenly everything's just changed. And and you think something as little as, okay, uh, and for those who don't know, uh the jet-to-wire ratio is how fast the stock, the water is coming out onto the wire, uh, and and relative to the wire. So if your uh stock is moving faster than the wire, then you're you're rushing, if it's moving slower, then you're dragging. But you know, even just you think moving from one to the other wouldn't make a huge difference, but if you start in one and you're running and you go to the other, then you're in a world of hurt when you're in the middle. And so there's so many things that you're just balancing on the edge.

SPEAKER_03 8:34

And I think the public doesn't understand the nature of a modern paper machine. So it's been said, and by the way, at NC State, our term for the paper machine is the sexy beast. It's it's it's something, right? But the public doesn't understand once you get above about a thousand feet per minute, the tolerances necessary for that machine to run and meet the spec and run reliably are tighter than those necessary to keep a commercial airline aircraft in the air. And we do that. 1,000 feet a minute, 3,000 feet a minute, 5,000 feet a minute, tissue machine running at 6,000 feet a minute. The reliability equation says, oh, that shouldn't work. And it's it's like running a bullet train. It just zooms. Amazing.

SPEAKER_07 9:20

Yeah. Definitely. And you have to call it some sort of nice name, or else if it's running it that fast, it's it or it's superstitious people. If it's running that fast and you call it a name, it's gonna be like, I'm coming off. Yep.

SPEAKER_08 9:34

So I love that perspective of the fact that I mean what we do is a miracle. And in some ways, I I think that's maybe a little biased because I love it. But can you kind of help to um people who might not know, or if this is their first year and they haven't had a meal experience, or or maybe they're trying to decide whether or not to come to Student Summit or some other Tappy event and learn a little more? Can you help like convince them? What convinced you that like paper making is a miracle? And I I think part of that's experience, but can you kind of speak to that? Because I love that perspective, and I I think a lot of people in the industry have that. They go into work and they love what they do and they and they've been doing it forever, and they're like, I wake up every day and I find something new. Yeah. Can you can you kind of speak to that that mindset of of of wonder about the process? Because it's dirty and sometimes gross, but there's also a sense of wonder about it. It is.

SPEAKER_03 10:21

Um well, think about uh petro. You know, they have another set of challenges, but Mother Nature's done a lot of the front-end work. All that organic matter laid down tens of million years ago, and pressure and temperature have pre-homogenized the raw material. Well, wood ain't no homogenization done. It comes in all over the map, right? Different moisture contents, mature wood, juvenile wood, all over the map. And somehow we take that storm of variability and we distill it down into something the paper machine can actually run. And so, you know, petro, bog standard, right? Pharma, boring. You ever think about working in pharmaceuticals? The raw material is perfectly characterized because it better be. The process is perfectly characterized. The FDA will not let you change the process except under extreme analysis. Now, as a person who consumes pills in pharmaceuticals, I'm happy about that. But do I want to be a process engineer in a process that is perfectly characterized? Oh, hell no. But in a paper mill, no one day is like the next. It sometimes is sheer controlled chaos. And so every day you go home saying, hey, I tamed the beast today. You know, I have friends that went to work in paper, got offered to go work in pharma. They call back in a year and say, please take me back to the paper industry. I need a paper machine in my life. I need that beast. True enough.

SPEAKER_08 11:50

Yeah, I know some people they call it the drug. They're addicted. They they try and leave, and often they'll come back because they they miss it. There's things to be said about both sides, but it it definitely has that interest that it grabs onto you and doesn't really let go.

SPEAKER_03 12:03

And we all yeah, we all are in this together, which is why we have this sense of camaraderie, this family feel, which is why the student summit is so successful. And the first year students, I brought 12 out of my uh 39, our first year students, and they're getting they're getting it. This is not business as usual. There's nothing like that in the other manufacturing industries. You know, I've had students who went and did a you know internship at at uh in Petro. They said, well, it's very interesting and it pays a lot of money, but there's none of this family feel. So we're all sort of in this together.

SPEAKER_08 12:37

Yeah. When did NC State start coming to Student Summit and what was that process like?

SPEAKER_03 12:43

Well, Student Summit has gone goes back a long way before me. And then as Tappy was going through some uh reorganization and some tough times, it kind of fell by the wayside. And then a group of dedicated people decided to resurrect it because we realized that young people are our germstot for the future. And without that, that we're not going to have a good future in paper. So a group of dedicated individuals got together and said, we need to reinvent the student summit. We need to make it a weekend that is going to show them what it's like to be in the family. And so that was, I can't even remember because I'm bad with the passage of time. Something I think happened yesterday, happened 30 years ago. But I've been coming to student summits for over 20 years, right? So we resuscitated it. And it was a dedicated, vigorous group of people, some who are not with us anymore, but uh, but we have a lot of old timers out here at the summit, and and they you know give up, gladly give up a holiday weekend every January. There's no place they'd rather be than right here with you fine young people.

SPEAKER_07 13:46

Hey, and we appreciate it too. Yeah, we appreciate all the people and all the all the wisdom that comes. And then I even see people from Tappy, and they're like, I've only been with Tappy a year, um, but they wanted to work for Tappy and they wanted to see the growth of these young kids. And I enjoy just meeting all these kids, and we're all here for the same purpose. We're all so interested in paper and how it works and what different things you can do with it.

SPEAKER_03 14:11

And the message they need to get, and y'all have to get is you also need to teach the public paper is gonna save the world. How's that for an ambitious statement? Because if we want to replace uh petrochemical-based plastics and stop choking on them and stop putting in the environment, there really is one alternative, only one alternative, and that's biopolymers. And the single two most prevalent biopolymers in the world are lignin and cellulose. So, and we do that every day. So now we can take that same expertise and now use it to start replacing throwaway plastics and other non-sustainable materials. Paper is going to save the planet. I tell my first year students that, I tell my seniors that. Go out and save the planet. But I am very biased.

SPEAKER_08 15:00

I mean, that's the thing, is uh I mean, people they they're looking for the solution and they and they're there's things out there, um, but you need a starting point somewhere, even from just a sense of risk and and business acumen and just you know looking at things from that perspective, you can't just go out and start a whole new biorefinery. It's a lot of risk. Um but we already have a lot of these processes in place. We already do a lot of these things, and so we're a great starting point. And that's one of the things that got me excited about paper when I started, is there's all these these cool things we already do, but there's also these really uh similar adjacent things that are getting really hot and exciting. Uh I really like molded fiber, I think it's fun. And there's a lot of these plastic and mechanical people who are messing with it, which is awesome, but they also don't have the background and training in cellulose like we do. And so there's a lot of opportunities and options if you're willing to take them and um with all these adjacent things. And I know I've been to your round tables and heard about non-woods and and you know, cellul uh nanocellulose has been hot for a long time and stuff like that. Can you kind of speak to some of those trends in the industry with replacing plastic and some of these new environmental things we're doing? Can you kind of into like can you decipher which ones have been around for a while and don't seem to have any fruit? And then can you talk about some ones that actually have potential and how you can tell the difference a little bit? Because I in our time, we're probably gonna see new things come up and we're gonna have to figure out which ones are these real and who's just blowing smoke.

SPEAKER_03 16:24

Well, it all depends on what's the driver, right? So we we've always been able to replace a lot of things with cellulosic fiber, but not at the same low cost as we get from pre-processed mother nature processed oil, coal, natural gas. And up to this point, people have not really been serious about the environment. They've been serious about their pocketbook. Well, your generation says, well, y'all have used up all of our grace. If we don't do something, our kids are gonna be really mad at us because they're gonna be living in a world burning up, flooding, dried up, right? People fighting over water and choked with microplastics. So y'all are saying the time, so the mutt the driver's different now. So we've always been able to do some of these things. Molded fiber is a home run, and uh, you can bet there's a lot of interest out there. You can bet that all the major consumer products companies, the food products companies, the meat companies, they are foaming at the mouth looking for options to replace plastics in their packaging. They are dead serious all the way up to the C-suite level. We know because we see them coming to visit and saying, what can you help us with? So making, I think someone said if we replaced every plastic straw in just the U.S. with a paper straw, that would be enough to build one 3,000 ton per day pulp mill. Yeah. That's just straws. What about styrofoam trays for sausages? What about wrappers for moon pies, right? What about uh the plastic that's involved in a piece of candy or a bag of candy or uh some fast food or microwaveable materials? It's all all fertile ground. And um, and so people say, well, we hear about mills closing. Yeah, that's business. Assets are gonna close, right? As markets shift, but but the market's not gonna go away, it's just gonna change. I'd say the future is quite bright. Yeah, and 3,000 tons, that's that's big pulp mill.

SPEAKER_08 18:32

That's a lot of drinking straw. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 18:33

I actually can we play a game real quick. I'm gonna give you a different type of nonwood, and on a scale of one to ten, you tell me how good you think it is um to replace a plastic. Yeah, I'm gonna start with bamboo.

SPEAKER_03 18:47

That's a lot of nuances involved in that. Well, we're we're here for it. All right. We're gonna start with uh bamboo. Bamboo is one of the more promising ones because it's a woody non-wood. That's a strange concept. So a lot of these nonwoods are not like wood. Wood is dense, hard, has a high bulk density, can be shipped long distances there, and can be stored efficiently. Straws and fibrous materials are fluffy. So they have a low bulk density, which means they require lots more shipping costs, and they can't be processed in our traditional batch of continuous equipment. Bamboo's different. You can chip it, you can mix it with wood, you can cook it in a continuous digester, and bamboo has good yield and grows every year. It's a perennial. So, and you can get fiber links all the way from hardwood light to super soft wood. So, if you talk about some of the more promising numb woods, a lot of people have been looking at bamboo, but they've been looking at it for 50 years. Yeah, definitely. If you want to compete with wood, you better be careful because wood is perfect for paper.

SPEAKER_08 19:56

What do you think is keeping people from pulling the trigger on something like that?

SPEAKER_03 19:59

Because wood is perfect for paper. And wood is grown very efficiently in this country, and we have a system that can process it incredibly efficiently. It yields fibers that are perfectly suitable for paper making, right? And it has a very clean composition. And a lot of non-woods don't know bamboo. You know, people are interested in it and they have used it, and it has been experimented with by some major companies that I won't talk about, but they've messed with it and walked away from it. At the end of the day, it better compete with wood, or it needs to have a unique property that wood cannot deliver, or it's not gonna make it.

SPEAKER_07 20:37

Yeah. I got a I got a strange one for you. Um, there's one person that has talked about seaweed. Do you know much about seaweed?

SPEAKER_03 20:45

I don't. Um so I'm I would be talking from a position of ignorance, but I know that it can have incredible yields, and that it in some cases is an invasive species like red uh seaweed, which is golf. So we can scoop that out and make it. But here's the question what is the yield? What is the processing cost? Harvesting cost, what is the yield in the process? What kind of fiber does it have? If you can answer those questions, it could be quite interesting. But at the end of the day, it will be competing with wood. Can it compete with wood?

SPEAKER_08 21:24

So as far as utilizing some of these non-woods, it in the situations like ag waste and you know some of the crowns of the trees that we have, can you see a home for those? Less of a replacement for wood and more of just uh utilizing these waste products we have? Um or are there other better applications like just you know biofuel, things like that?

SPEAKER_03 21:46

Well, I'm not a raw material expert, but I think we we take out of the forest what we need to take out, and we leave behind the trimmings, the thinnings, the branches, and the leaves, and they go back in the forest, right? We can take Some of them off. We've shown that we could take X percent of them off and still do due diligence to the environment. But the properties are not good for paper making. But for bioethanol, for specialized products, maybe for nanocellulose. Maybe, right? Probably not for paper there.

SPEAKER_07 22:17

Another one, and I know you are pretty passionate about this, but corn stock.

SPEAKER_03 22:22

Corn stalk is a delightful residue. We have a bunch of it, somewhere between 250 and 400 million tons in the U.S. every year. And a lot of it we find a hard time doing something with since they won't let the farmers burn it off anymore. I've patented a process to turn it into hardwood-like fiber. Beautiful. Pulp's pretty easy, bleach is pretty easy, makes smooth, printable paper and can make some really soft tissue. But it competes with wood. And it can't because you have to harvest these fields and they are sprawling. And the then you have to truck it into the mill. Now you have a scale of economy issue trying to compete with wood. And the fibers tend to be less resilient than wood, which means they're they're easier to break, they're less recyclable. Can it be done? Yeah. You know, you you've got people who make uh millions of tons of sugar cannabis gas pulp in India because they that's their alternative to a lot of trees, which they don't have. So but so could we? Yeah. If we got some bug that killed our hardwoods tomorrow, we could turn to corn stalk and make it work. But economically it's hard to make it work.

SPEAKER_07 23:38

And I got one more I think I want to ask about, and then maybe we can move on or wrap it up. But uh, what do you think of hemp? I've heard people talk about hemp and how fast it grows, and I just it's an area of um that I don't know much about it.

SPEAKER_03 23:53

I've worked on uh several hemp projects, all unsuccessful because most of the hemp people believe that the project can be successful predically on to on one thing, which is that hemp is better for the environment, the trees. They're already starting from a position of ignorance. So then some of them are saying, well, but look at all the byproducts we can make with hemp. It can generate textile fiber and oil. If you start looking at the economic, uh, the techno feasibility, the technoeconomic uh feasibility analysis, it it it's you know, and then there's the the growing issue, the legality issue, right? And so, for example, if you're growing industrial hemp, the government's gonna say, well, we'll give you a permit, but we're gonna come by and do site inspections. And if the THC level goes above a certain level, we're gonna ask you to burn the whole thing down. And sometimes when industrial hemp is stressed, when certain conditions happen temporarily, and when it's very young, there goes the THC level. And if they come on that day and test, burn it gone, gone, right? So hemp is a is a wonderful plant. It's very easy on the earth. It does yield a number of different things. So it is useful, but what is it competing with? So let's always think, what's what's it competing with? So some people say, well, what about uh CBD? What if we take the byproduct of hemp that's grown for CBD? Well, if you look at what they predict the maximum consumption of CBD would be for the whole United States, there ain't that much stalk associated with it. Because you extract, by the time you extract that material, you don't have enough stalk to make it viable. So you have to grow the hemp for the fiber. So when and that's so that's a fiber crop. And unlike an agricultural residue where the corn or the wheat or the barley or the rye paid for the planting and the harvesting, hemp has to pay its way for its fiber, and that makes it a big challenge. So I know people are looking at it. For example, um, you can take and pulp it and send the outer long fiber in the phloem, the bast, and that can be used for uh textiles and other long fiber applications. That's 30% of the weight of the plant, 70% is the core, which has a very short fiber length and really is hard to make good paper out of it. But it could be used for thermally molded products with a little bit of reinforcing fiber, and now you've got a cheap source, and hemp can be uh pulped, quote unquote, using some surprisingly simple processes. It's not necessarily a full-blown craft process. So it's interesting, but it hasn't found its vector for success yet. And there are people punching, trying to punch away through for industrial hemp. I want on to be successful, but you know, it's it's it's a it's a big challenge.

SPEAKER_08 26:56

Yeah. Huh. Thanks for sharing. All right. So I got one last thing, unless Toby had something. Um we were just wondering, so if you have one thing to say to students uh who'd who'd listen, um, what's one piece of advice or um, you know, maybe uh a looking forward into the future or looking back at something that you found especially helpful in in in your career here and time here in the paper industry? Well, what's one thing you could share in part?

SPEAKER_03 27:25

Well, there's a lot of things, right? So if you want to be a good engineer, if you want to be a successful engineer, right? So you have to think about what's going to be a good career for me. And so there's two different things. What is the impact of what I do on people's lives? Every day, the paper industry produces products that let people live a clean, healthy, civilized, comfortable life. Every day. 500 pounds per person per year of paper products in the U.S. made sustainably and responsibly. And not foolish things either. Packaging is not foolish, right? It allows economic e-commerce. There's nothing foolish about toilet paper, right? And even printing and writing papers, they're changing, but right? But there's a surprising amount of paper copying that still goes on. Free sheet makes a lot of money. And there's a surprising amount of cellulose in that iPhone, right? So we make people's lives comfortable every day. So you know exactly what you do, right? Number two is what is my career going to look like? Well, it's wide open. The paper industry is looking at a staggering amount of retirements. And so for your generation, if you're willing to go in and put your licks in, and if you have a passion for leading people and managing people, your pathway to high-level management, high salaries, lots of responsibility, probably quicker than any cohort in the past 50 years. So if y'all are willing to get in there and slug it out, you could be our youngest vice presidents, regional vice presidents, maybe even CEOs, and I say go at it. Awesome.

SPEAKER_08 29:10

Well, uh, thank you very much, Dr. Bird, for uh being with us. Uh, we appreciate your insight and your time. Yeah, it's like I said, always a pleasure to see you down here. Um, and it's I feel like I always learn something new whenever I'm chatting with you.

SPEAKER_03 29:22

So it's time well spent, right? Yeah, that is and happy 110th Tappy.

SPEAKER_07 29:26

Definitely, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 29:27

Thank you. Thank you. All right, well, join us next time on the side note.

SPEAKER_05 29:35

Hey everybody, this is Tanner Stogner from the Auburn Tappy Group. Um, I'll let everybody else introduce themselves.

SPEAKER_06 29:42

I'm Conyers Bravo from the Auburn Tappy Group. I'm Gavin Knight from Auburn Tappy.

SPEAKER_04 29:48

And my name is Michael Roos, also from Auburn, and currently representing the student chair at Tappy Student Summit this year.

SPEAKER_05 29:56

So uh me and Michael have uh a little bit more experience in the in the wheelhouse of the student summit since we came last year to the Greenfield's South Carolina Tappy Student Summit. Um so we're gonna ask these guys, uh Gavin and Conyer, some questions. Uh, what's been the highlight of the student summit so far?

SPEAKER_06 30:16

I think just the opportunities of interviews and everything, like probably the career fair by that. So um like I came in here with only two interviews lined up and then you got another two immediate like within 20 minutes of walking through the career fair. Nice. I think it just gives out basically your best opportunity to talk to every other companies and just see what they're about and I mean what their day-to-day work life is like.

SPEAKER_01 30:40

I would say the career fair, as well as just being able to um meet other people from all over schools, because when I was coming to I wasn't really what school uh sure what schools would be here, but like we got Maine, Western Michigan, North Carolina State. So it's been cool to see people have this common interest across the US and then we all meet in the same place.

SPEAKER_05 30:59

Yeah, that's uh that's kind of what I realized last year, is like the industry is nationwide and uh it's in a lot of different places. And as far as you were talking about the interviews, I think last year I had seven interviews over the course of two days. So it's it was crazy. But yeah, there's there's nothing like the student summit to uh to have opportunities to network with companies.

SPEAKER_04 31:20

Yeah, yeah, me as well as Tanner. We our first time attending the student summit was last year. So this is both of our second years, and now both of us have been helping run the whole the whole show. Um, and so that's that's been a treat, you know, very different, you know, experience, you know, being behind the scenes and kind of facilitating an experience for you know freshmen or at least you know rookies to the whole student summit experience.

SPEAKER_05 31:48

Yeah, so kind of going into the interviews, what was y'all's expectation and how did it differ from whenever you got into the interview?

SPEAKER_06 31:56

I kind of felt that it'd be a lot more um like tell me what I thought they'd be a lot more expecting of um experience, which I was worried about because I'm a freshman. Obviously, I don't have any experience in the field, but um almost every company I talked to didn't they didn't really bring it up. They saw I was a freshman, so it was kind of understood, and they just kind of talked about what experience in any field I had and how that could relate to any kind of engineering field, or especially the paper open paper field. So they kind of just wanted to know what kind of skills I had instead of what experience I had.

SPEAKER_05 32:33

Yeah, and I bet you were kind of a standout being a mechanical engineer. Most of us are chemical engineers or yeah, everything else.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

For me, I was expecting the interviews to be like super formal. Was a little bit nervous about it, not gonna lie, but um the minute I got in there, it was like they weren't so concerned with your um like your experience or like having a bunch of knowledge in the pulpit and paper field. They're kind of just trying to see who you are as a person, so it's a lot less formal just having a conversation with them.

SPEAKER_04 33:01

I think you tend to find that with a lot of interviewers in this industry. You know, they're they're very they they they do have a strict set of topics they're gonna cover, but overall they just want to have a conversation with you. Definitely. Um versus like you know, in other industries where it's like they need they they're trying to find like the prime applicant in a competitiveness where they're measuring intelligence, essentially. There can be a lot of technical questions at different types of interviews. Um, those are, in my opinion, the most stressful, but you don't find that a lot here. They just want to make sure that you will work well with the people at the company. That's what I find.

SPEAKER_05 33:41

Yeah, and I I've noticed that like some of the bigger companies will have like a script of like these are the guaranteed questions you're gonna have, and then after that, it's a real conversation. It's not even an interview anymore. You're just getting to know you as a person and see what you're like.

SPEAKER_06 33:55

Yeah. All right. For mine, a lot of it was they would start off just introduce myself and then introduce themselves. They wouldn't even look at the questions until like they felt like we knew each other enough to kind of get into that those questions, like, okay, now I'm gonna read through some of these. They wouldn't even read all the questions if they didn't feel like they needed to. So they just kind of make sure they check these boxes and then as long as they like know us as a person and um feel that we're like good enough per like the quality of like character over making sure we just check simple boxes, it was a lot more personal.

SPEAKER_05 34:28

Yeah, for the uh the human bingo card, y'all did y'all have fun with that?

SPEAKER_01 34:33

I I had really enjoyed it. It was a cool experience. Like it kind of started off like people were kind of small talking, like getting to know you, and in the last 15 minutes, like people were just coming up to you, like, hey, can you fill this box? Can you fill this box? But it was a lot of fun, it was a really great way to meet new people.

SPEAKER_04 34:48

Yeah, the intention behind it, you know, was just to encourage at least some people to take responsibility and actually try to build connections in preparation for the trivia night and connecting or the uh engineering competition. So like it's kind of good to see that at least some people experience that. What about you, Gavin?

SPEAKER_06 35:08

I personally I wasn't able to make it. I had interviews during that time as well. I wish I was able to make it, but yeah.

SPEAKER_04 35:13

Yeah, no, it is it's it's something we experimented with this year. Um, and there are some quirks that we're gonna try to work out going forward uh that will make the process a lot more streamlined uh behind the scenes. But um I mean I think you know it did its job.

SPEAKER_01 35:29

Yeah, I did find out I was the only mechanical engineering major in the whole group because by the end of it, everybody was coming up to me and was like, hey, I heard you the Mekie, sign here, sign here.

SPEAKER_06 35:37

Yeah, I definitely thought there'd be a I I didn't realize how much Kemi was like, no, y'all y'all are a rarity around pulp and paper. I didn't realize that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 35:46

Well, we're trying to recruit y'all, that's the thing. We need more of y'all in the job in the industry.

SPEAKER_04 35:51

Because y'all are good in like engineering departments and in maintenance, you know, which is essential in any mill. Yeah. So one big thing that I think would be important to talk about is how has this experience different than general career fairs you've experienced in high school or at Auburn? You know, what has made this so different?

SPEAKER_06 36:12

Yeah, I think that um like my experience career fair is you go up, talk to some person from like a representative from their business for about like max I've seen is like 10, 15 minutes. And then after that, you give your resume, and then maybe they call you, maybe they don't, maybe they email you, and then that's kind of the end of it. But here it's like I interviewed with these people. I met the people first, and then I interviewed with them, and now I get to like see them for the rest of the weekend, kind of see how they're like who they are and kind of get to know them better anyways. Yeah. So even if it like doesn't end up in an internship or co-op, that's what kind of build a connection with them.

SPEAKER_01 36:51

I'd say the big thing how it stands out is like obviously it's all the same industry, which makes it a lot more fun because you don't have to worry about like oh what industry, what is this, what is this? It's like all pulp and paper. Then another thing I realized when I like going up to the career fair and just talking to folks, they like genuinely like wanted to interview everybody they could. It wasn't like you got to go up there and just try to have a connection just to get the interview, and they were genuinely just interviewing everybody they could, so that was a good part of it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 37:17

And I mean, kind of to your point, Gavin, like you know, something that I've experienced, you know, having helped facilitate the summit this year, is I mean, you pick up on names relatively quickly, yeah. You know, especially when you're in like some sort of leadership position, and it's like you see familiar faces all around, but then it's like, oh, you start having casual conversations with people, like you know, outside of a an interviewing scenario. And it's really nice that you know, we've got over 300 people here who are all just wanting to do the same thing, and that's just grow the industry.

SPEAKER_05 37:50

Yeah, one thing people and grow the industry. Yeah, one thing that I thought was really cool is like last year at the student summit, I was like super busy with interviews, and I didn't have that much time to network. And even in the limited time I had to network, I met somebody that I worked with that summer. So like we showed up day one and I started looking around and I was like, Wait, I know you. And she was like, I know you. And then I was like, Yeah, you were at the career fair. And uh, so it's just you'll probably see these people if you stay in the industry for the rest of your life. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 38:20

I just wanted to touch on that because I think that's an important distinction to make, you know. The the summit is is really a spectacular opportunity for students, especially freshmen and sophomores, to like have a fun experience away from school, get a little break, yeah, you know, you know, to meet people on a more personal level over the course of a few days. Yeah. And there are some, you know, fun activities that can pass the time, you know, continue networking. Like this whole thing is it's set up to foster our success going forward. Yeah. And it done it does so in a fun way. And so that's just what I wanted to touch on basically how unique the the opportunity that we've been presented is to attend here.

SPEAKER_06 39:04

Yeah, I mean, I feel like I even like not only did I get closer people from like other schools different, completely different parts of the country, I also had closer people at our my own school. Yeah. Just with like, okay, this is our group. Like, I I I can't think of a time other than like maybe our first banquet where we were all together, or like most of us, or a good bit, like a good group of us were together, and I can actually meet people, like know their names this time, and then not that especially that because I'm a freshman and this is my like first time meeting everybody. So I feel like I've actually built better bonds with people just from this.

SPEAKER_05 39:37

Yeah, I know. There's definitely some things from this summit that I think we need to take home with us and uh definitely implement effectively in our normal routine as a Tappy student group.

SPEAKER_04 39:48

Yeah. Well, that's all that I wanted to talk about.

SPEAKER_05 39:50

So you got any questions for us?

SPEAKER_01 39:52

Was also part of Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 39:55

Foo I'm skinny. Um I really liked the uh the round tables we did with some of the industry professionals. He was from Georgia Tech, but he had a really, really cool thing about um nanocellulose and kind of new uses in the industry for that. Um so that was really interesting and just talking to people. That was fun.

SPEAKER_04 40:15

With me being behind the scenes, it was very different, you know.

SPEAKER_05 40:20

Michael's been running around like a chicken with his head cut off, and that's why everything's flowed so well.

SPEAKER_04 40:24

Yeah, I know. With uh during my last year, probably the thing that was the most fun was um trivia night. It was just fun to you know goof around with you know the team of eight that we were at and try to try to get some pulp and paper facts. Oh yeah. And I mean Dr. Scott and Dr. Brew, they do a phenomenal job preparing that. Uh this this time around, honestly, I mean they they outdid themselves from last year. And so that's that that was definitely a highlight because Dr. Scott, I don't know how he makes those Excel fonts.

SPEAKER_05 40:55

Yeah, no, that's uh that's a lot, uh, a lot of questions, a lot of weird questions. Yeah I knew way more this year than I did last year, but uh that's a that is a pretty complex Excel spreadsheet. I know it's beautiful to look at. He's a master at work.

SPEAKER_04 41:09

Yep, yeah. Probably so trivia, I think, would be my choice again for my favorite part of the summit. It was a lot of fun, yeah. Yeah. This is there's a reason it's been going on for seven years, I think he said. Uh it's been I think seven or six, I can't remember.

SPEAKER_06 41:26

Yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_05 41:27

Well, let's wrap it up. All right. Goodbye.

SPEAKER_00 41:32

As Dr. Bird said, papermaking is going to save the planet. I can't think of a better reason for young people to seek careers in this amazing industry. Thanks to our students Tanner, Michael, Conyers, Gavin, Parker, and Toby, and to Dr. Matt Bird for taking time away from Student Summit to offer their perspectives. Hey, don't forget to share this episode to spread the word about opportunities in pulp and paper. And subscribe to Better Together so you won't miss our second Student Summit episode. Thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_02 42:15

Hello everyone, this is Larry Montague, president and CEO of Tappy, the pulp, paper, packaging, tissue, and converted industry's go to resource for news, industry trends, and technical and management information. We hope you enjoy today's Better Together podcast. And remember, there are two types of people in our industry Tappy members and those who should be. Have a great day.