You are browsing the archive for October 2011.
The preparation I do for a meeting depends on the meeting. If it’s a recurring weekly thing where I’m supposed to have made progress – well, then I show the progress I’ve made. If it’s an update meeting, I just go and listen to whatever the current status of whatever the project is. If it’s a meeting with another engineer, I go with no preparation, and then we work on whatever problem we’re solving. But I’ve learned about a new category of meeting, now that I’ve started dipping my toes in the business world. It’s the “reaching out” meeting – or the “touching base” meeting – or the “finding overlapping interests” or “maybe we can collaborate” meeting. Basically these are meetings that are the first contact between you and the other person. Sometimes you want something out of the other person, sometimes they want something out of you, and the [...]
One side effect of coming up with my ideas while running is that I’m influenced by the things I see and hear while I’m running. Normally, it’s no problem. I go to a gym where I can run on the inside track and either ponder the engineering problem of the day or let my mind drift. But the other day, I had an issue where I couldn’t recall any problems I had been having. Instead, my mind turned to people watching and observing the activities around me. And being a suburb dweller, the primary activity was kids playing sports, namely basketball. 6 courts full of children competing against one another, working with their parents, working with their coaches and striving to be the best basketball players they can be. So what’s the payoff? What do these children expect? I’m sure some of them are just there to have fun. They’ll [...]
There’s been a constant call in the media to recruit more people into science, technology, engineering and math. I’ve talked a lot about this issue on my own blog. Mainly that I believe the argument that we are graduating too few people into STEM disciplines is one propagated by industry to keep wages low on the one hand but also to feed their desire to expect more and more from entry level employees and cut back on training that was standard in the past. There’s been reports on both sides, arguing that impending mass retirement will create a shortage and others that we’re falling behind other countries and need to catch up. Other concerns are probably valid but mis-targeted. Analysis I have done on open jobs shows that the kinds of engineers we’re actually short of are software engineers and programmers and developers rather than the more core engineering disciplines. But [...]
Like most people, I’ve been known to Google myself. I recently came across a reddit link to my interview on EEWeb. And as soon as I linked to the page, I got very POed. Underneath the link was a lone comment: I winced I’m sorry >.< Why do girl EE’s look like that and not like the hot stuff from the Business and Admin Depts?? My first response, of course, was to think that this was ridiculous as a) I know several very beautiful women who are engineers and b) it’s not like most of the male engineers I know are fashion models, either. I also thought the obnoxious commenter needed a good dose of some Single Dad Laughing. After my initial WTF response, I calmed down and decided that perhaps I should look at it from a different perspective and try to answer this moron’s the question. Why aren’t there [...]
Lately, I’ve been wondering about my research group and if I’m bringing the right people on board in the right order. It’s not that I have specific doubts about a person or anything to directly point at. Rather, I think everyone in the research group should operate, well, like a well-meshed gear set (pun intended, [photo credit]). Mentally, this makes perfect sense to me. I just wonder if I’m suffering from delusions of grandeur and they’re going to mix like oil and water once we get past the initial phase. I’m currently up to 5 students with sufficient overlap on projects to ensure they have a reason to work together and I have reiterated it in almost every group meeting. My students seem to want to work together and are open/friendly with one another, so that is a very good sign. But more importantly, what are the key mechanics of running a [...]
It began as so many engineering projects do – the simple thought, “you know, it wouldn’t really be ALL that hard to do….” One of my good friends drinks a lot of carbonated water, and on her wish list is a Sodastream carbonation system. I looked at those online, and it offended my open-source sensibilities that you have to buy the filling station, the proprietary CO2 bottles, the proprietary flavoring, and the proprietary bottles to fill. Really, I thought, one should be able to buy a tank of CO2, some appropriate fittings, and do this a whole lot cheaper. Now I really don’t drink much soda, nor do I care for carbonated water, but as an engineering project this fascinated me. There are even excellent tutorials already available online on this very subject. I walked myself down the street to the welding supply shop (I love living near a technical university [...]
This is a followup post to the question from last week: Where do you do your dreaming and thinking? It was good to look at how myself and others approach the conceptualization phase that precedes any big project. And there really are a lot of places people dream up new project and product ideas. But the next question is: How do you then capture these ideas? This is an important subject because without a proper recording of the idea, it can get lost in the minutae of every day life. And if you’ve ever lost what you thought was a killer idea, I’m sure you can associate with that horrible sinking feeling in your stomach. You just knew that the idea you had would have made you a million bucks. If only you had written it down! Or maybe not! Some people record ideas on non-papyrus means. I think some of this is [...]
I’ve been thinking a lot about the variety of authors we have at Engineer Blogs. We have a mix of academic and industry engineers and each arena provides its own challenges and goals. But one major thing we have in common is probably getting the test equipment you need. In the photo, USN avionics technician Norton is repairing a test bench (via Morning Calm News). Test equipment can kind of run our lives and our schedules if we aren’t careful. Academics are probably familiar with scheduling time at strange hours and working around the other researchers and students who might need to share the same equipment. Those of us in industry have similar issues with whose project takes priority for the EMI chamber or the oven. Does heat treating a production piece after a weld take priority over an emergency investigation of a material that might be failing at lower [...]
In a couple weeks, I plan to spend some time with my students on writing lab reports. Both in science and engineering, students spend a pretty significant amount of time writing reports (or they should!). I decided this would be a part of my curriculum after remembering my experience teaching circuits labs the first time. I was amazed at how many students had made it that far without having a good understanding of how to write a lab report. I ended up spending a good chunk of lab time trying to teach this particular skill. The reason I think this is important is not only for academic success but for success in a job. As an engineer, you have to write a lot of reports. Your superiors have to explain why they’re paying you, so you need to be able to justify your existence. Education in this realm, however, has [...]
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