We’ve all heard those stories about engineers who started out as little junior engineers. When they were kids, they were always building things with Legos or tinkering with machines. Braxton Bragg says that wasn’t him. The future Product Innovation Engineer with Evansville’s Berry Global was more into sports.
As he got older, though, the foundation for a career in engineering took shape. At New Albany High School, along with participating in athletics, Braxton found that chemistry, physics and math interested him, and that he wasn’t half bad at those subjects. His junior and senior years, he took a job working on a farm and discovered that the mechanics of the tractors and other equipment fascinated him. As these factors pulled together, he recognized where his path was leading. When he headed off to college at the University of Southern Indiana, he majored in engineering.
And when an opportunity for an internship at Berry Global came up during his sophomore year, Braxton jumped on it. He was familiar with the plastic container and product company, but didn’t know much about its operations. What he learned hooked him in a hurry.
“I was blown away by how much goes into making a plastic drinking cup or plastic lid or the container that holds your products in the grocery,” Braxton says. “The kind of technical crew it takes to pull off efficient production of something like that, it took me for a shock.”
Hired on as a full-time employee in 2019 and promoted to his current position in 2020, Braxton says he enjoys being a part of the company’s global headquarters because that gives him a front-row seat to everything from product ideation to seeing items he worked on come off the production line. He currently has five or six projects on which he serves as project manager, he says, all in different stages. He enjoys the variety of the work and the fact that every day can be a little different.
He also enjoys the constant drive to make better products more efficiently. “Coming up with a better way to make a better widget that nobody else can make, that’s always the process,” Braxton says. “Innovation as a whole is consistent on the product and process side.”
And he’s delighted to have landed a job with all those features just a short drive from his hometown. Married to his high school sweetheart, Braxton enjoys staying in touch with friends and family and taking advantage of Southern Indiana’s hunting and fishing options. And while engineering ultimately took up a larger part of his life than the sports that he focused on as a kid, he hasn’t given up athletics completely. He’s taken up running, and he’s preparing to run his second marathon.
