You are browsing the archive for February 2012.
These past two months have been pretty crazy because it was effectively the playoffs for proposal season (NSF, DARPA, NIST, etc…). For you football fans out there, you can probably appreciate this analogy: I’ve had five completions in 3 weeks and now I’m sitting back and hoping for some nice YAC. That, combined with the time I spent with my students last semester is finally starting to gain traction on its own. The students working in my group don’t have any specific classes that train them to work on my specific research area so I’m left with the task of tutoring and training them in the lab on procedures and whatnot. Basically, my summer and first semester was spent training and acquiring equipment. And I can officially say: My group haz momentum! Yesterday, I was in the lab working on a few things and showing my student some new tips/tricks [...]
An article in the Guardian newspaper today drew my attention to a rather stunning online archive of drawings and sketches from the engineers who designed and built Britain’s railway network in its 19th and early 20th century heydey. I heartily recommend you have a browse here. Whilst that collection is certainly a wonderful resource, I have a rather ambivalent relationship to engineering drawings. Like butterflies pinned into collection books, they are a fixed, dead representation of what once was an idea fluttering merrily through an engineer’s mind. Throughout the initial phases of concept and the first wobbly-lined and crossed-out sketches, to 3D CAD models spinning and rotating on the monitor, through to prototypes, parts take on a life of their own. They grow from chrysalis to caterpillar, evolve before your eyes and then – they are ossified, sectioned, labelled and numbered like any other sample. Their drawings sit there gathering dust on the desk, yellowing [...]
I’m a mechanical engineer. I love mechanical things. My parents gave me lots of Legos to play with as a child and I suppose I never entirely grew out of them. If I had to say what the favorite part of my job is, I’d probably say it’s when parts come in the mail. I mean, it’s like Christmas. Stuff shows up on your desk in a nice box and you get to rip it open and play with what’s inside. How awesome is that? After parts arrive though, there are still the tools to play with. Here are some of the coolest tools out there that I think every mechanical engineer should have. Calipers The first time I played with a pair of calipers, I was maybe 9 years old and following my dad around to a space satellite fabrication facility. An engineer picked a pair of calipers up [...]
Despite FluxCorp being a multinational corporation, the amount of bureaucracy that I deal with day-to-day is usually pretty minor. That’s because I rarely stray outside of my job function. However, whenever I have strayed, that’s when I notice the huge bureaucratic machinery operating (usually) invisibly in the background. A couple of years ago, our satellite office purchased nearly a million dollars of lab equipment. We wanted to move some heavy workbenches from one room to another and was told by our Real Estate Department that it will take 3 weeks to secure a quote from local movers and that the cost of moving would probably be $3000. With that much money in equipment, we also thought it’d be a good idea to get a lock for the door. Unfortunately, Real Estate said they first need to go through a procurement approval process for the purchase, then send out a purchase [...]
Sophi Kravitz is an electrical engineer who enjoys being somewhere near the bottom of the learning curve. Currently, she is pursuing RF engineering, analog engineering and building art based on RF signals. She lives in a workshop containing a kitchen and living room with her husband. I am an Electrical Engineer working as a Salesperson. I love engineering, it is my true passion, and I spend lots of time in my home shop building, designing and making stuff. I live in the Hudson Valley, NY, which isn’t particularly desirable for tech people. The only large company here is IBM. There are very few design engineers in the area, which makes getting a generic engineering job at a generic small company pathetically easy. So why did I switch? I worked as a New Product design engineer for 7 years, enjoyably switching projects (and jobs) quite often. As an engineer, I found [...]
One of the things that I think an advisor should do is train their students technically (duh!) but also train them about the social-political-monetary issues of working in a competitive environment. I’m not talking about force my students to be Democrats or Republicans, but rather that they should understand that things are much more interlinked than they might believe. For my students that are pursuing academia, I hope that I’m giving them an accurate representation of what it takes to be in the same role that I’m in. For my students that will end up in industry, I hope this at least gives them some insights and clues for what to look for when they’re deciding on a company. I’ll give you a few examples of what I’m talking about. All of my students (4) are currently paid out of startup money, which I’m using to seed projects that I’m [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 recently about the workforce, the number of engineers trained in the US, and why so many STEM students change majors. One line of reasoning [...]
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 [...]
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