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STEM graduate crunch solved
We’ve been hearing a lot on how there is a huge shortage of STEM workers and how the US needs to have more to stay on top. It looks like our concerns are well on our way to being fixed. The financial sector is apparently downsizing, so all those tech majors who originally planned to go into business and banking are thinking of a career in…you guessed it…engineering! An article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek discusses the fact that the financial sector has been seriously cutting down on hiring. Many tech majors discussed in the article said that they majored in technical fields to get into finance, but now that jobs aren’t available, they’re looking for jobs doing the stuff they were actually trained to do. The article does mention that things are shaky in the tech sector, but says that, “few expect Silicon Valley to undergo the carnage suffered by Wall [...]
Facilities & Support
We’ve talked before about the effect of office space on getting work done, motivation, and having somewhere to tinker. But what about the facilities and staff support element of getting your job done? By facilities, I mean both the equipment you need to do the job (microscopes, CNC mills, 3-D printer, furnaces, or what not) and the space in which you do the work. In an academic environment, there’s often a dedicated staff member to help with training and maintenance on the bigger , shared pieces of equipment, like electron microscopes. My university has some fantastic facilities and support in this respect. I can’t say enough about how wonderful these staff members have been. The equipment I have access to is cutting edge, and well-maintained. However, the spaces themselves are a different story. My group’s optical lab suffered a major loss last week when a faulty valve in the ceiling dumped water in [...]
Real Life Examples of My $100K+ Education At Work (by Sam Feller)
Sam Feller is a mechanical engineer living and working in the Boston area. He enjoys sharing stories and his particular sense of humor at www.awkwardengineer.com I’m convinced that in my job, I use 95% of the material covered in engineering school less than 5% of the time. Most of what I do boils down to on the job experience or falls in the category of project management. In many cases, not much would separate me from a talented hobbyist or tinkerer. Of course, this makes me question the value of my education. Why did I spend all that time learning all that stuff? I’ve considered it for a while, and I like to tell myself that the 5% of the time I really use my degree is what makes me valuable as an employee. In a tangential line of discussion, there’s also been a fair bit of talk in the news [...]
WTF #5: The Undead Amongst Us
Back in WFT #2: Motivating the Unmotivable, I mentioned how I had been handed the impossible assignment of making sure my undead colleagues — working for now, but have been notified of their pending layoff — continue to be fully committed and motivated to the project at hand. At least one reader mentioned in the comment section how he was surprised that being an undead was demotivating. Although I responded to that comment in length, I had no concrete evidence that they weren’t doing their jobs. Well, I did, sort of. I was aware of their job searching efforts. In fact, I quite encouraged it. I quite like my soon-to-be ex-colleagues and I do wish better futures for them, wherever they may land. Then there was that time when I ran into the lot of them at a restaurant during lunch. We’re all working from home nowadays so running into [...]
Weekend Journal — Engineering (Business) Travel
I’ve written before about business travel, but this time I’m traveling as a design engineer; last time it was general thoughts on travel after a short stint at a conference as a technical writer. So I decided to consider what engineers need to know in order to work successfully on an overnight trip to a foreign locale. Design engineers aren’t made to travel. We have quirky needs, lots to do back at the lab and massive amounts of baggage (take that one how you want to). However, sometimes the need arises to get off your butt and go see a customer. Other times it’s a supplier. And sometimes you need to go simply because the boss tells you to. Early this week, I’ll traveling for my day job and I thought I’d blurp out my thoughts (that’s right, blurp) before going. While not all of this will be strictly for [...]
Why a Postdoc is basically needed in Academia
I’ve been totally swamped with proposal writing over the past few weeks, hence my erratic posting schedule. Also, right as I was going to sit down and work on a post, I found out that I was denied for another proposal, totally sapping any motivation to do anything useful. For those of you keeping score, I’m 0-5 in the my first 6 months with a bunch pending. That’s not what I would call a stellar start to my academic career. Needless to say, I’ve contemplating career choices and shoulda-woulda-couldas, but I think that’s only natural at points when things aren’t going the way you envisioned. It’s not all bad; I did get very good reviews from my Chair, which means in the Chair’s eyes I’m doing some things right even though I don’t feel like it is. One of the proposals that rejected was in a Young Investigator/Young Faculty category. For those of [...]
Preparing for…everything!
I’ve probably mentioned before how I never intended to get a degree in engineering. I started college with the notion of being a research scientist, but initially decided I wasn’t scientist material. I spent a couple years switching through various majors and ended up in journalism for a while. I managed to even bag a couple awards for my writing. Fortunately, I ended up being second in line for a journalism position, and when I didn’t get it, decided that I missed physics and should go back to school. One unexpected side effect of this detour in my education is that I got a lot of very valuable experience writing. I didn’t realize it until much later, but a lot of science and engineering revolves around writing, and that background, as useless as it seemed at the time, has come in very handy. As an undergrad back in physics, I [...]
Planning Beyond Graduation
This semester, I’m working with an undergraduate on research, and we’ve had some interesting discussions about preparing for the academic track instead of an industrial path. My graduate institution is a very research-oriented school, and encourages students to follow the academic path. Undergraduate courses are very theoretical, and their senior capstone experience is a small research project. Most students are expected to participate in a research project at some point besides the capstone project. My undergraduate instution was almost exactly the opposite, expecting the majority of students to find jobs in industry after graduation. Students are encouraged to take internships, and the senior capstone project is done as an industrial partnership. Materials science and engineering, courtesy of the “and”, tends to have a much larger research component than other engineering fields, so it’s not so absurd for a department to expect most of their students to go to grad school. However, [...]
WTF #4: Illusory Superiority
Illusory superiorty, a.k.a. full of ourselves. This is the only conclusion I can come up with to explain the surprise that all of us felt when FluxCorp decided to shutter our satellite design centre and to layoff my entire design team, save myself (who’s being transferred out-of-country). Last August, our team was re-org’d into a new division. We all thought it was a positive move. The new division’s goals were better aligned with the products we were working on and both our new manager and new director are old guards in this product line. Although we knew that our building lease was soon coming to an end and that an office move was likely in order to save money, we felt confident we would move along with everyone else to the new site. After all, why wouldn’t we? We are “wonderful” designers. We have a good reputation with the people [...]
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