What’s In My Bag: Miss Outlier
I’ve never actually carried a backpack on a regular basis. I was homeschooled all the way up through highschool, so there was no need to carry textbooks back and forth – they stayed on the bookshelf for when I needed them. And then in community college, by random chance I had a shoulder bag from Land’s End hanging around, and I decided to just use that. I’ve grown accustomed to the shoulder bag, and then when I moved to undergrad from community college, I just stuck with the genre. (Under family “bag,” mine would be genus “shoulder.”) I had one bag that lasted me all the way through undergrad, then in grad school I got a new bag for the occasion, and barring unfortunate wardrobe malfunctions, it’s going to last me until I finish here. In my bag: Wallet and keys So many keys! No, I did not murder a janitor, but I…
Becoming a Thought Leader
I recently attended a fascinating event held at a marketing company, specializing in PR and marketing for startup companies in the cleantech space. Now I recognize the necessity of marketing (as separate from sales), and I understand how much of it (nearly all of it?) is done online these days. But my goodness, I could spend my entire working time on the computer doing marketing, if I followed all the “best practices” as outlined! Hmm, I guess that’s why even small companies find value in a dedicated marketing person… 🙂 One of the audience asked a very thoughtful question: “Many times startup companies are operating in ‘stealth’ mode, to avoid showing their hand before their product is ready. But how then to build a marketing buzz or excitement, or establish yourself in the market, while dealing with that kind of restriction?” The answer I found quite relevant – it has…
Value Added, Value Taken Away
Chris has talked before about how engineers tend to think highly of people in “value-add” professions. At least as perceived by engineers, if you are contributing something useful, that contribution is respected. But perception of value is a very tricky thing – two people in very different fields may both be doing work that is important, but neither one may appreciate the other. I’ve been considering value from another angle – instead of looking at how much you are adding with your skills, what happens if you look at how hard your skills are to take advantage of? Recently I watched a situation unfold where two people involved in a project – one an engineer, one a businessman – had a falling out and canceled the project they were working on together. Often it is just as instructive about people and their character and values to observe what happens when things go…
Finding a Job Building Things
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…
Firing by an Engineer
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…
Sound Mind and Sound Body
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…
Engineering Celebrities
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…
Background Check
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…
Carbonation Project
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…
Poring Over Patents
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…