November 2011
You are browsing the archive for November 2011.
By Chris Gammell on November 14, 2011
Last week I wrote about childhood inspirations and how they affected you as an engineer. First off, I wanted to apologize to those who had responses that were not properly captured. Some people pointed out that I missed biological engineering of any sort (honestly, I didn’t realize we had any bio-centric readers! cool!). And others informed me that I left out certain critical toys to their childhood. One commenter astutely mentioned that I must be younger than them; too right! I based this on my own experiences, I should have thought to poll for older engineers’ favorite toys so we could capture a wider swath of influences. Anyway, it’s hardly a great survey, but information such as this is always interesting. So I hope you enjoy it!
Posted in Engineering Mindset, Hobbies | Tagged childhood, inspiration, toys |
By FrauTech on November 11, 2011
Most designs are a solution to a problem. But a lot of times you can’t always solve the problem the way you want. The ideal solution might require a redesign of interconnecting parts that you can’t necessarily change. Or it might require time to test components that you don’t have. Sometimes you have to pick the next design iteration because it’s available or works within your time frame. But how can you be sure you’re not sacrificing the best solution for something that’s easy? Sometimes you need to have an interim solution. Sometimes you do have to make the quick and dirty choice while still working towards something long term. I’ve had several problem child pieces of hardware lately and this decision has come up several times. Often I’ve been forced to come up with a practical quick fix. It’s tough when you do that to keep the momentum up […]
Posted in Mechanical Engineering | Tagged design, manufacturing, project management |
By Cherish The Scientist on November 10, 2011
Today I did something horrible: I cancelled my classes. I really didn’t want to, but my younger son had to be taken to the ER for some stitches. (He ended up not getting them because, after hemming and hawing a bit, the doctor decided it was looking fine and the stitches would be more traumatic.) But back to the topic at hand, I hate cancelling classes. The students are very unforgiving of late and absent professors, something I discovered when I was on a much bigger campus where I regularly showed up about 30 seconds prior to the beginning class. Apparently punctuality is actually lateness in their eyes. I remember one of my professors in undergrad who showed up about 7 minutes late for class once. We were all just getting up to leave when he walked in. My infantile (and entirely fictional) telempathic abilities picked up a huge, […]
Posted in Academia, Education, Engineering Mindset, Workplace | Tagged absent, classes, late, meetings, tardy |
By GEARS on November 9, 2011
As you can see from the mean (47) and standard deviation (22) of my comprehensive exam results, the numbers are a lot lower than I expected. I thought the exam would be tough, fair, but tough. I did get comments from students saying things like that but nevertheless, the numbers are lower than expected and basically show more than 23rds of the class would be failing. I mentioned a few weeks ago at GEARS that grades in engineering programs are skewing towards the 80-90 range. I would prefer a system that grades 0-100 (0r 0-10) where above a 50% is passing. While that won’t fly academically, it’s probably a true representation of the material learned by the average student. But because educators must deal with this grade inflation and dissatisfied students in a course are more likely to write negative reviews than satisfied students writing positive reviews, this presents a significant problem. […]
Posted in Academia, Education | Tagged academic theory, curving, education, exams, failing, make up work |
By Miss MSE on November 9, 2011
One of the big challenges of engineering is the time it takes to get from innovation to production. This year, President Obama announced the Materials Genome Initiative for Global Competitiveness, as a joint effort between industry, academia, and several major government agencies. Materials issues are considered critical both to national defense and energy policy. However, the time to get a brand new material from the lab bench to market tends to be measured in decades. This initiative aims to decrease that time by making foundational data more accessible. Accordingly, one of the major goals of the Material Genome Initiative is to create better open databases for materials information. In biology, with the rise of bioinformatics and data sharing requirements by funding agencies, there are some impressive databases, such as FlyBase and WormBase, each devoted to a particular organism. However, there are a number of challenges that arise when trying to share materials data. One […]
Posted in Materials Engineering | Tagged Public policy |
By Miss Outlier on November 8, 2011
Recently I had the chance to hear Mark Zuckerberg speak. The reaction of the audience when he appeared was almost comical – as soon as he walked across the stage, almost every person in the audience whipped out a cell phone or camera to take a snapshot. I was sitting near the back of the room, so from my vantage point I just saw a sea of glowing screens. And, of course, then I saw laptops out and those very photos being posted to Facebook. And it made me ponder – does engineering have its own celebrities, just as entertainment and politics also do? The recent outpouring over the passing of Steve Jobs underlines the incredible impact and the high profile that technical visionaries can have. But on the whole, engineering has very few recognizable faces. Bill Gates, people recognize. Steve Jobs, ditto. Mark Zuckerberg maybe slightly less, but among the […]
Posted in Engineering Heroes | Tagged engineering celebrities, engineering heroes |
By Chris Gammell on November 6, 2011
The other day I was reading through a recent NYT article about why science and engineering students have trouble making it through classes (and subsequently, why the count of engineers in the US is low). While I was dismayed at the general fallout of students, when compared to the incoming numbers, I was encouraged by some of the programs the article highlighted. In particular, Notre Dame Engineering seems to be taking up an idea I laid out a few months ago, namely remedial tinkering classes; this would give the students the context they need in order to help them make a decision about continuing engineering school. In the course of re-reading my article, I noticed a comment thread between me and Fluxor about the inspiration we have for engineering in the first place. How does our play influence what we might want to do in our careers? Which engineers seem to congregate […]
Posted in Engineering Mindset, Hobbies | Tagged toys |
By FrauTech on November 4, 2011
There’s a phrase: jack of all trades master of none. I was thinking of one’s progression as an engineer. When you graduate college you are in many ways like a Swiss army knife (drawing from rowland jones). You have a wide variety of basic tools but are probably not particularly good at any one thing. In many ways college teaches one the ability to learn engineering. And then you spend the rest of your career learning engineering. But at some point you have to start narrowing it down. Especially if you are, like me, a mechanical engineer or as one of my classmates put it a mercenary engineer. My degree qualified me to work in any number of disciplines: mechanical systems, fluids and heat transfer, structural analysis, flight and aerospace technologies, and manufacturing. The first job you take can often lead you down the path of a particular discipline within your […]
Posted in Mechanical Engineering, Workplace | Tagged communication, engineering education, job training |
By Cherish The Scientist on November 3, 2011
As you may have noticed, we have a new addition to our writing staff at Engineer Blogs. Miss MSE joined us as a guest contributor. What you might not have noticed is, with Miss MSE’s arrival and Paul Clarke’s departure, Engineer Blogs’ active writing staff is now 2/3 women. I’m a bit surprised by that given the usual ratio of men to women in engineering. I have a few theories why, aside from the obvious one that the male writers keep leaving. However, one underlying issue that is likely related is that engineers just don’t seem to like to write. This one puzzles me. Is it because engineering is a male-dominated field, and young boys are given the message early in life that they are bad writers? Does this make them not want to try? Or is it that they really ARE bad writers and realize the effort is futile? […]
Posted in Communication, Hobbies, Meta | Tagged blogs, Writing |
By Miss MSE on November 2, 2011
Hello! I’ve been a reader and commenter here on Engineer Blogs since my first timid steps into the blogosphere. I’m thrilled to be here as a guest blogger, and to represent my little corner of the engineering world: materials science and engineering. I generally find that most undergraduates are unaware of MSE unless required to take an intro course, which includes many mechanical and biomedical engineering students. Part of this is a matter of size; even the largest MSE departments are usually under 100 students per graduating class. It is also very typical that the class size grows dramatically between the 2nd and 3rd year, when students change majors or are finally forced to declare. Another reason has to do with job titles after graduation. Looking through the alum database from my undergraduate institution, job titles are more frequently Process Engineer, Product Engineer, R&D Engineer, or Quality Engineer. We don’t have the […]
Posted in Education, Materials Engineering |
Subscribe By Email
Subscribe By Reader
Recent Comments