You are browsing the archive for December 2011.
If you can’t tell from the title or the picture, the semester is over! I’ve made it through a 4-month whirlwind of activity, craziness, anxiety, and, not to toot my own horn, success. Going into this semester, I thought I had a good idea of what it took to be tenure track material (I mean, I got the job didn’t I?!?). That last month though, was a little rough at times. All in all, I think everything went about as well as it could go for my first semester teaching. I’ve read some of the comments from my class survey (I’ll discuss more in a later post) and many were of the flavor, “I was a little apprehensive about this class with a new prof and given that this was his first time teaching, it was a lot better than expected and things went well.” That’s encouraging for the future. While [...]
I was having lunch with some coworkers today, and one of them started talking about another place where he worked. He was saying that people were ranked individually and as a team, and when the company would hit hard times, people at the low end of the totem pole would get tossed. I was a bit horrified hearing this, and then he said this was a pretty good situation. Apparently at another company with which he’d worked closely, people were ranked solely as individuals with no regard to the team. This meant that there was very little incentive to cooperate with teammates – if you helped your teammate, that meant you were decreasing the odds that your teammate would get canned and upping them for yourself. In other words, it seems to encourage backstabbing and secrecy. Almost all of us agreed that we would not enjoy working in that sort [...]
Recently, Inside Higher Ed had an article about humanities majors being hired into IT positions. The comment section was immediately contentious, but this is the internet, after all. The argument was between two factions: IT professionals complaining it demeans them, and humanities people claiming the IT people are snobs. I’ve been thinking about this for awhile. My parents are both computer programmers, with my mom having worked as a manager for many years. She’s one of the few among IT professionals her age who actually majored in computer science. Most of her coworkers are English majors, or history majors, who made a career change at some point. Why not have that point be very early? The other issue I have with the commenters is that not all IT jobs are the same. Yes, I want the person setting up my database to have a strong technical background. But systems and software change constantly. Even [...]
This is a guest post from Carmen Parisi of Fake EE Quips. He’s the first of many guest bloggers who will be popping in to Engineer Blogs on a regular basis to add their opinions and insight into the field of engineering. Though I’ve only just recently joined the workforce and am still a pretty green engineer, I’ve noticed some differences between school and work. The differences between the two aren’t necessarily good or bad; they just take some getting used to. From the outset, I can name my favorite aspect: being able to leave work (both mentally and physically) around 5PM. Knowing I do not have to slog through hours of homework once I get back to my apartment is a fantastic feeling. I’d almost forgotten what hobbies were! The rest of the things I’ve noticed so far aren’t nearly as polarizing but still worth noting. Let’s have [...]
Now that my glut of “new job” posts is running out of steam, I should probably get back to an oldie-goldie topic here at Engineer Blogs. In fact, I’ve had this one in the hopper for a while and I thought it be good to bring up before the beginning of the new year when all the kiddies head back to school (well, I don’t have any children, but I notice around town when kids are out of school!). STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education is a hot topic these days. People are finally starting to realize that the engineering work force is getting older and this could have detrimental effects in about 10 years if the queue is not filled with bright young engineers. And as of right now, there aren’t many in the pipeline. In my own experiences, I recently realized I am one of the youngest engineers [...]
It’s finals time here, marking the end of my first semester as a TA, and it’s been an enlightening experience. I’ve discussed some of the gaps between what I expect junior-level engineering students to be familiar with, what the curriculum tells me they should be familiar with, and what they actually have learned over at my own blog. One of the biggest challenges for me has been the differences between how my undergraduate education was organized, and how things are set up at my current university. In my undergraduate experience, we were generally taking major-specific courses in our second year. I remember getting design problems and more open-ended questions my junior year, because we already had a decent background to build from. Here, students are discouraged from declaring a major within engineering until the end of their second year, instead taking courses in general engineering and humanities. In some respects, I like this approach, [...]
A few weeks ago, I had my first proposal rejection and it wasn’t pleasant. I definitely had to break out the scotch. This was a huge proposal with many universities involved and while I counted myself fortunate to be a part of the team, I’m still disappointed. My part was a supportive role for the overall proposal ideas, but it still would have been a significant chunk of money to jumpstart my academic career. The one thing that’s really disappointing, especially since this was my first proposal, is that the entity holding the purse strings is not one that gives you feedback but just says “thanks but no thanks”. When I started writing my first couple of proposals, I dreamed with delusions of grandeur (hitting my first 5 in row or something stupid like that) but I definitely feared striking out. My startup funds are available for the first two years so I basically [...]
One of the skills that engineers are required to have is critical thinking and the ability to quickly assess and analyze a situation. [Good] Engineers are often brought in to situations because they have a certain background or have worked on a particular topic before but this new situation is slightly different than their previous experience. However, the time to get immersed in a topic is limited and often, they’re asked for their opinion the same time that they’re learning about the new topic. This is difficult situation because the engineer often doesn’t have all of the pieces to put together a complete puzzle. However, they often have enough to get a clear picture of the situation to assess accordingly. Because this is a skill needed by engineers, one question for engineering educators is “how can this skill be taught?”. The best method that I can think of that can [...]
Last week I wrote about how I was leaving my engineering job, taking a week off and starting a new job this coming Monday. I’ve spent the week working on some of the projects I hoped to, but it went far too fast. The last task was to write about how I am preparing for my new job. Obviously I won’t know how it went until I actually start, but I recall starting my last job and wanted to try and do some things differently now. I’ve tried to generalize them for an engineer starting their first job or their thirteenth job, so hopefully you can find something useful in here. So what should you do when you’re starting your new job? Get to know the technicians, manufacturing people and customer engineers – I eventually got to know these people at my last job and my life got much easier once [...]
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