I love building things. I love working with my hands, I like using power tools, I like the physical making of STUFF. (Or the tearing apart of stuff, which is a lot of fun but perhaps less productive….) And by choosing to major in mechanical engineering, I thought I was giving myself the best shot I could to find a career where I can build stuff. And now I am looking around at what my friends from undergraduate university are doing, and none of them are building things. And if I look at what my friends from graduate school are doing, none of them are building things either. Part of this has to do with what you WANT to do. Of course if your interests lie more on the modeling/simulation side of mechanical engineering, or if you are more interested in leadership roles, or in management, or in design rather [...]
As a general rule, I never thought my job responsibilities as an engineer would include HR duties. Admin duties, yes – engineers are not exempt from Excel data entry, scheduling, and organizing forms with pink sticky notes. (I do love my pink sticky notes.) And management duties, yes – many engineers work in teams and need to know how to motivate, collaborate, delegate, and generally navigate in leadership settings. But the thought of hiring folks, paying salaries, crafting policy – that just scares me. What the HR department does deals directly with issues that get to the heart of human emotion – money, titles, benefits, and scope of power. Eesh. No wonder it scares me… Fluxor has recently moved to a job that requires hiring folks, and Cherish and FrauTech have both written about being on the interviewing side of the hiring process. So far I’ve never had to hire [...]
Recently there has been a tragedy in my family, a tragedy on my campus, and a tragedy at my alma mater. When people in your circle pass away, or you lose someone in the community, there is grief but there is also an incredible focus and refreshing of priorities in life. There are truly only a few things that really matter. In the end, it is the people that matter. As much as I prefer the logical simplicity of equations, math, and physical objects – as much as I spend my day immersed in study and planning and working in the field of engineering – truly, it is ourselves and our family, friends, and fellow human beings who deserve the highest priority. The latin motto, “Mens sana in corpore sano,” can be translated as a sound mind in a sound body. This holiday season (in the U.S., at least), I [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
There has been some discussion on patents before here on EB – how you need to have not just an idea, but also proof-of-concept, a physical prototype, and manufacturing process in mind to apply for a patent. How sometimes you need to have a patent to start your company, and sometimes they are worthless to you, and sometimes they are just a roadblock in your way. But sometimes it’s not the patents on YOUR idea that you are worried about. What happens if you have a brilliant, light-bulb-flash idea, and somebody ELSE seems to have patented it? Bugger! What can you do? That’s the situation I’ve been in this week. I’ve been poring over a ridiculous number of patents (okay, maybe not ridiculous, but 32 – that’s enough to make my brain hurt) to see if what I want to do is going to infringe anybody else’s patent. Here’s some of the things that you [...]
I happen to be in an area of the country that is really, really enthusiastic about entrepreneurship. Outside of Silicon Valley, Boston is as good as it gets (better, some say). I have always found the idea of starting a company fascinating – and in fact, my minor for my PhD is entrepreneurship. One of the things that all entrepreneurship classes teach you is how to do an elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is a very short (length of an elevator ride, get it?), concise description of your idea, that coveys just enough information to get the person you are talking to excited to hear more. Normally it’s used when you are pitching your company idea to a potential investor. But it can also be used to describe your research. Think about it – when somebody asks, so what is your research? Or what is your job? They don’t want [...]
Last week I learned to use a new machine – a goniometer. One of the things a goniometer does is measure the contact angle of droplets on surfaces. You can dispense some liquid out of the dropper onto a flat surface, the vision system captures data, and the software analyzes what angle is formed between the droplet and the surface. Why is this useful? For my research, I needed to learn more about the surface properties of some materials I was interested in. If you know the contact angles of various known liquids on an unknown material, you can calculate things like the surface energy of the material. Then you can make some progress toward figuring out the work of adhesion on that surface, or the fracture energy between two surfaces. So I thought this would be easy. Put drop on surface, measure contact angle. But the key here is [...]
[Note: post has been updated, pictures now corrected.] There is a reason that “non-handy” people sometimes struggle so awkwardly with mechanical tasks. It’s because there is an entire playbook of simple, untold habits that so-called “handy” people have picked up. People like carpenters, plumbers, handymen, electricians, auto body workers, welding technicians – people who work with their hands for a living (or a hobby!). If you tinker with things enough, especially from a young age, you get a feel for how to do things that it’s hard to learn any other way. This leads to a communication impasse at times. A mechanically-minded person will delegate what they consider a straightforward task. But there are two problems – one, the engineering mindset may have left out some logical steps along the way, and expect you to fill in the gaps. For instance, “Go plug in an extension cord for me.” What [...]
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