You are browsing the archive for March 2011.
The theme this week at Engineer Blogs has been networking and if you haven’t had a bunch of engineers give you advice on communication and socializing than you just haven’t lived. I thought I’d chime in with my own, as usual cynical opinion. My first job (beyond paper delivery) was a part time position while I was a full time student. I was looking for a nice easy office job and hoping to avoid having to go into retail or the fast food industry. My sister had worked a data entry position several years before and she offered to email her old boss (who had liked her very much) and see if she was looking for anyone. Turns out she wasn’t, but she knew someone in another department who was. And so became my first job. Every time they hired someone there they asked us if we knew anyone first [...]
Networking. Just like Professor GEARS, I hate that term. People, especially recruiters, throw it around as the answer to everything. Need a job? Network. Looking for a contractor? Network. Interested in other fields? Network. I can’t stand how people seem to think it’s the panacea of the engineering world. The worst part is, NO ONE EVER TELLS YOU HOW TO DO IT! Until now. Yup, this is the engineer’s guide to networking. What is networking? Let’s start in the obvious place. What the hell is networking? I’m going to define it thusly: Networking is the process of meeting people in the hopes getting something done later. This could be a new job, obtaining critical resources or even meeting (different) people. Alright, now let’s say it in terms engineers know and want to hear: Networking will get you a job. It will make your current job easier. Or it will introduce you to some [...]
Getting laid off. This was what happened to me more than a half dozen years ago now. I was the first one to be let go from a start-up that was starting to show cracks in its hull. It wasn’t a surprise. I didn’t get along with most of my colleagues. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get along with the rest of the team; rather, a clique had formed before I arrived and they had apparently decided that I wasn’t to be part of it. In the two years that I was there, the only person that I got along with was with the wife of a colleague from a previous job and another outcast that wasn’t part of the clique. Unfortunately for me, the outcast left voluntarily a year before I was let go. When the kraft envelope was gently pushed across the cafeteria table by my [...]
I’m Back! And if last week’s post didn’t get me kicked off Engineer Blogs guest blogger list, this one might! This week’s Theme is Networking and I’m much more snarky when it comes to this topic. Networking is great when it’s a CAT5 cable because your wireless is on the fritz. Otherwise, I severely dislike the word networking. I put words/phrases like a networking event, functionalized, a setup was realized, think outside the box, and mission statements in the category “don’t ever use” if you want to be taken seriously. (I mean, would you take me seriously if I had the GEARS Mission Statement: Realizing novel, functionalized instruments to expand your networking tools by thinking outside the box to create paradigm shifts? I know I wouldn’t.) The reason I don’t take marketing/business jargon like build your network or expand your network seriously is because the aspect of obtaining a network is treated [...]
This week’s theme on Engineer Blogs relates to networking and finding jobs. I have both worked in the Real World™ as well as being a grad student and an engineer in an academic research group. My experience getting jobs before I returned to school in my mid-twenties was almost bi-polar. People didn’t go so much on recommendations, and most of the jobs I applied for were in the paper. (Yes, back before the internet became the world’s largest classified ad.) I was living in southern California at the time, so that meant, of course, that I had a hard time getting jobs because I was usually competing against several hundred applicants. I had an easy time getting jobs that I didn’t want and that didn’t pay well, but it was very difficult to find jobs I actually enjoyed. The low spot was spending a year working as a secretary at [...]
Last week I had my first ever technical interview in my field. I was told ahead of time to bring “all my textbooks” and a paper and pencil. For better or for worse, the interview was to be on the phone. Since most of my core engineering class books are boxed up in the storage room behind the garage I lovingly refer to as spidersville I grabbed my Fundamentals of Engineering Exam reference book instead feeling this would have many of the basic equations. I tried to prepare beforehand by looking stuff up but found there’s not a lot of information online for mechanical engineers and technical interviews. So I figured the least I could do was keep notes about what I was asked and post it here later to give somebody else the heads up. Though I suppose this is the point where some pre-internet engineer whines about how [...]
Now that I’m a full time blogger for EB, I guess I had better get my act together, start thinking more about what I write, and spend less time reading magazines. This week, however, it’s the content of magazines and the way in which hobby projects are written up that I want to consider. In the UK, it’s hard to come by electronics magazines in the local shops. It’s just not a popular hobby as, say, fishing, motorbikes and guns – don’t ask! So most hobby electronics engineers get magazines through the shops’ own subscription system (they order it for you) or direct from the distributor. I do remember a time, however, when electronics magazines were very popular, so I guess that shows my age. I used to select a magazine each week or month and then follow the building of the project. A great example of this is shown in [...]
In my post a couple of weeks back on A Matter of Scale: Electromigration, I mentioned that once silicon features shrunk below 100nm into the world of nanotechnology, previously negligible physical phenomena now play a big role. One of those annoying phenomena is the well proximity effect (WPE). To explain how WPE affects integrated circuit designers, we have to first talk just a little bit on how PMOS transistors are created. The figure above shows the standard textbook cross-section of a silicon wafer with an NMOS and PMOS transistor side-by-side. The silicon wafer, also called the substrate, is a crystalline structure where each silicon atom shares four covalent bonds with neighbouring silicon atoms. However, it is standard in the IC industry to lightly dope the silicon wafer substrate with boron. If you remember your high school chemistry, silicon has four valence electrons and boron has only three. When boron is [...]
Hi Everyone! I’m GEARS which stands for Grads, Engineering, Academia, Research, and Students. I’m a newly minted PhD student who has accepted a tenure track position at a small Tier 1 private university (dubbed SnowU) starting at the end of this semester. Rather than looking back retrospectively and getting caught with shoulda-coulda-wouldas, I thought I start blogging about my experience transitioning from a wide-eyed PhD student to a refined, distinguished assistant professor. (Well maybe I’m getting carried away here but you get the point.) Blogging helps me jot down thoughts and ideas which will (hopefully) help me mentor students more effectively and run a successful research group while actually reaching students in the classroom. Yesterday, I harped on how Knowledge Learned doesn’t show up anywhere on a company’s balance sheet. That makes it very difficult to explain and justify why you should do something yourself, as a researcher, in a [...]
My alter-ego is a geophysicist because, somewhere along the line, I decided I didn’t want to be sitting at a desk all day. I was under the impression that because geologists are outside all day, geophysicists must be, too. There is some truth to that argument, but it turns out to not be applicable to the types of geophysics in which I am interested. However, being a geophysicist has given me plenty of opportunity to hang out with geologists, and sometimes they have strange ideas. On the other hand, it was actually another engineer with an interest in geology that gave me the strangest idea of all. In fact, he offered me a beer if I could follow through on his idea. (This is standard fare among geology folk, but I opted for a handmade milkshake from the local hole-in-the-wall burger joint near campus.) This particular friend, along with several [...]
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