Miss Outlier
I’m a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering, with a speciality in machine design and control. I keep a Craftsman toolbox in my bedroom, I make a mean pan of brownies, I love Star Trek and Firefly, and I am easily distracted by side projects. Life is good!
By Miss Outlier on October 3, 2011
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 […]
Posted in Business, Communication | Tagged elevator pitch, ideas |
By Miss Outlier on September 26, 2011
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 […]
Posted in Mechanical Engineering | Tagged contact angle, experimental, goniometer, measurement, mechanical engineering, surface |
By Miss Outlier on September 12, 2011
[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 […]
Posted in Engineering Mindset, Mechanical Engineering | Tagged fittings, handy, teflon, trick of the trade |
By Miss Outlier on September 5, 2011
Today I’d like to lead you through an exercise in spatial comprehension. Or maybe it’s 3-D visualization. I’m not sure what the correct term is – but what I’m talking about is inversions of patterns. The goal of this post is to describe how to make a mask when you know what your end product should look like. What is a mask, you say? In general terms, a mask is a clear sheet that is patterned with opaque areas. You use it in the cleanroom for lithographic processes – that is, processes that transfer a pattern to the product you are working on. Is that gibberish? Let me show you were the spatial skills come into play… Say I want to make a glass slide with tiny gold wires on it. This is going to be an integral part of Iron Man’s flying suit, so it’s important to get these […]
Posted in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering | Tagged cleanroom, gold, lithography, manufacturing, mold, silicon, stamp, SU-8 |
By Miss Outlier on August 29, 2011
In my life, I am surrounded by nerds. I love this environment – it’s a rare thing to be surrounded by equally passionate and quirky people with engineering mindsets. But sometimes I look around and think, “man, how did this get to be normal?” So I thought I’d give some examples of the nerd environment that I take for granted. And I am curious to hear from you – what nerdy expressions do you see from your friends? How do you express your own nerdiness? (Disclaimer: all this is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, and I by no means intend to criticize anyone’s personal choice of expression.) Apparel Level 1: Generic Harvard or MIT shirt. This is meant to express “I’m hot stuff, and smart, so look at me I go to an Ivy League school.” But if you ask those who actually attend such schools, they would never wear such […]
Posted in Engineering Mindset, Hobbies, Workplace | Tagged accessories, clothes, expression, nerd, tshirt |
By Miss Outlier on August 15, 2011
Once a year, my school provides a Professional Development Seminar for postdocs and late-stage PhD students. It’s a lottery to get in, and this year I got a spot in the class. I was really excited about this opportunity – the class is taught by professional (of course) teachers, and is only open to 12 people, to keep the setting personal and interactive. I wasn’t sure what to expect out of the workshop. As I understand it, companies in industry will sometimes provide these programs to their employees, to develop them for management. The program that I participated in, however, was a program normally geared for professors. I didn’t know that there were development seminars aimed at professors – and man, what a good idea. The skills involved in being a professor are quite different that the skills needed as a student, even a PhD or postdoc student. You have […]
Posted in Academia, Business, Communication, Education, Workplace | Tagged management, professional development, training |
By Miss Outlier on August 8, 2011
The theme of the week is deadlines. As I was thinking about the deadlines in my life as a grad student, I realized that on any given day, or week, I really have no deadlines. My deadlines are all long-term. For instance, the main deadline for me now is graduation with a PhD by next June. Before that, it was to pass qualifying exams, and perhaps you could also count the final project of classes each term as a deadline. But really, I don’t have TPS reports waiting on my desk for me Monday morning. Before all of you readers roll your eyes and tell me I have no right to complain at all (“Do you KNOW what I have to deal with each week??”), let me point out a few things that are unique about dealing with long-term deadlines. Mentally Dealing with Long Term Deadlines I think it takes […]
Posted in Academia, Workplace | Tagged deadlines |
By Miss Outlier on August 1, 2011
No matter what kind of engineer you are, or what systems you are working on, your projects will have sensitivities. In simplistic terms, sensitivity is a measure of how much changing an input will vary the output. From a mathematical point of view, you can assign coefficients to describe how important each input is, and generate a model of your process. From a practical point of view, this means it’s important to understand which factors in the project you are working on are the critical factors. For instance, let’s take making biscuits as an engineering project. Making basic biscuits is a fairly simple, well-known process. There are only a few ingredients, it only takes one bowl, and cooking only involves popping them in the oven. So what parameters do we have in our process? For the purposes of the example, let’s make a short list (although there can be many more): […]
Posted in Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering | Tagged analysis, manufacturing, model, process, sensitivity, system |
By Miss Outlier on July 25, 2011
One of the beautiful things about engineering is that there are many, many solutions to each problem. In school, it was comforting to realize that there was a correct answer to every homework problem. I think engineers are stereotypically wired to like a precise, logical, correct answer. A SINGLE answer. But then, I got to graduate school. And suddenly, the problems that I encountered didn’t HAVE an answer. (Yet, at least.) That was scary in itself. And even scarier, was the notion that even if I did find AN answer – it might not be the only one. Which means, my answer might not be the best one. Yowza! Eventually I learned that in the real world, it’s not always about having the best answer. You can almost never prove which answer is best, and even if you could, it’s usually not worth the time it takes. It’s about having […]
Posted in Communication, Engineering Mindset | Tagged answers, decisions, disagreement, solutions |
By Miss Outlier on July 18, 2011
Belts and wheels, wheels and belts – mechanical engineers use them in all sorts of places. Belts are used to transmit power, and in particular to transmit power long distances, around corners, or in other funny situations where other solutions won’t work. Some common examples in varied applications are the treads for heavy vehicles (tanks, bulldozers, etc.), the timing belt in your car, and drives for robotic arms and legs. Historically, belts were used to transmit power to machines across an entire machine shop floor when the source of power was a steam generator. Or, belts were used to transmit power from a steam-powered farm tractor, to another piece of farm equipment. For example, here’s an old tractor that is hooked up to a belt – you can’t see it, but it’s attached at the other end to a threshing machine. But here’s the problem – unless the wheels are […]
Posted in Mechanical Engineering | Tagged belt, crowned wheels, drive wheel, power transmission, timing belt, Vee belt, wheel |
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