Year Two Began Anew…
…and it’s kicking my ass, as you can probably tell from my lack of posting. Last October, I posted on how I was diving right into the deep end (see: What’s the difference between 18 and 27?) because my feeling was that academia is sink or swim and those that can cope will, and those that can’t cope won’t. I was most decidedly in the camp that thought they could cope and things would be easier once I got a grant or two under my belt. This led to a, shall we say, promiscuous year applying for any and all proposal solicitations that were remotely in my area (~10 NSF-length proposals, and ~10 smaller opportunities). I wanted to make sure I got some funding in the first year to get off to a good start. It turns out that when you get more than 1 or 2 grants under your belt,…
Timing
One of the things that I was totally oblivious to (and unprepared for) prior to starting this tenure track position was how critical timing is when dealing with proposals. I’m fortunate enough that I do have some money coming in from proposals, so that’s a good start. However, now that I have money coming in, I need students to work on projects. Unfortunately, my funded projects are on topics that where none of my current students are working. And the topics for my current students are sufficiently different that it would be unwise to switch them to a different project. Thus, I’m in a time crunch where money has been funded but there are no students around to support. This is one of several issues with timing that I’ve seen. I’m going to point a few issues below but feel free to comment below and add some more. Are there…
Whose turn is it to fix stuff?
One of the problems luxuries of having a spouse who is also a mechanical engineer is that we are both completely capable of fixing stuff around the house. Moreover, DrWife and I both enjoy fixing stuff around the house, something that I don’t think should be taken for granted. Recently, we just bought a new house which has left us with numerous evening tasks and weekend fun like: re-tiling the bathroom, installing new outlets and lights, painting, re-screening screens, assembling furniture (see picture), and general unpacking. And now that we’ve established what we need to do, now all we need to figure out is who’s going to do it??!?! It turns out, answering this question isn’t always so simple. DrWife and I end up arguing more about this than just about anything else (I guess that’s a good thing?!??). For the small stuff, it tends to work (after arguing) by splitting the job. I’ll…
What’s In My Bag: Just Back From Traveling
I think it’s very apt that we’re discussing “What’s in my Bag” this week because I just returned home, at 1 am :-\ , from traveling. My bag is what I would call an “omni-bag”, meeting all three (or four, depending on how you look at it) criteria: room for a full laptop, room for extra papers for grading or reviewing, and expandable to hold a change of clothes or two. The fourth is looks. I think Kenneth Cole did a very nice job on the styling. I previously discussed this bag, The Business Bag, on Engineer Blogs. I bring up traveling as nice timing for this post because I find my bag tends to pick up some extra things that I normally wouldn’t carry around on a daily basis. Inevitably, these things tend to stay in my bag for a few days before I finally clear them out. Since…
Knowing when to slow down
As a new faculty member on the tenure track, I don’t have the luxury of saying no very often. It’s not that I can’t say no at all, but rather, I’m worried that if I don’t say yes, it will be misconstrued that I don’t play well with others. That could potentially damage my case for tenure when that comes up or make it more difficult to work with certain folks because I will seen as being in the camp of one faculty faction instead of another. A lot of the advice you read on the interwebs about this topic is that you should say no as often as possible because you need as much time to advance your research as possible. When offered other committee positions or responsibilities (journal editor, conference organizer, etc), you’re supposed to avoid those like the plague for as long as possible. I can totally…
Open Ended Questions
I’ve been wanting to post on the topic of Open Ended Questions for some time but haven’t been able to formulate my thoughts properly. One of the things that I think defines a person as an engineer is the ability to put forth potential solutions to open ended questions which may have several answers. I am particularly discussing questions where there is not one ideal solution but rather a series of tradeoffs and the person answering the question must justify their choices. One of the things I tried to do in the classes I taught this past year was to keep some questions open ended to see how students would formulate their answers. In some cases, this was successful but in others, not so much. The other thing that struck me as strange is there wasn’t always a connection between a student’s standing and their ability to answer open ended…
dr. versus , Ph.D.
I, like many of my academic colleagues, have been extremely busy these past few weeks (hence the lack of posts) with finishing the semester. There’s final projects to be turned in, finals to be graded, last minute faculty meetings, and things like commencement weekend which really eat into your time. Since this is my first semester as an assistant professor and I teach a required senior level course for all mechanical engineering majors, I decided to attend commencement weekend. For those of you that don’t know, when you receive your PhD (Doctorate of Philosophy), you’re hooded as part of the commencement ceremony. When you’re a faculty member, you’re supposed to were the academic regalia of your university (where you received your Ph.D.) and your hood. I ran into two small problems while preparing for commencement: 1) I was never hooded as part of the formal ceremony and 2) my university…
Bring Back Manufacturing
Recently, there has been a significant amount of rhetoric by President Obama on how we need to re-establish manufacturing in the United States. This topic was front-and-center in the State of the Union speech in January. Additionally, President Obama has been touring the country, speaking at universities, businesses, campaign stops, and fundraisers about how we can boost our economy by emphasizing manufacturing. The President, thankfully, has backed this initiative with a serious amount of funding. Much of the following information is paraphrased from Manufacturing.Gov, the website detailing the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation. In a nutshell, the government is looking to fund up to 15 Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation in the next year backed by up to $1 Billion in funding. The pilot institute, with a focus on Additive Manufacturing, will be funded using FY2012 funds, meaning it will be awarded before the end of September. These Institutes will primarily…
Needing more than two PhDs to file taxes
This past week was the deadline for the joyous occasion of filing your 2011 taxes. This was the first time that DrWife and I have had to file taxes in the US in several years due to being overseas. For us, filling out our tax forms was a soul crushing lesson that simple math eludes us. At least we got a happy ending. In short, we’ve learned that either more education than two PhDs in Mechanical Engineering is needed to fill out your tax forms or the IRS and Congress needs to simplify the tax process. [Before I go on, I want to put a disclaimer in here. This post and forum is not meant to be a political statement one way or the other. Constructive criticism and comments will always be accepted. This is not meant to devolve into a political discussion about which political party contains the more out-of-touch…
The Grey Zone
This week, as part of Theme Week, we’re discussing our roles as engineers and how it might change depending on the level/status of the company. Now, I’ve already started by breaking the rules about our little post figure because my ‘company’, SnowU is actually a research university which deals heavily with the research end of the spectrum. However, my area within the spectrum is slightly different because I like to think that my research is right on the border between fundamental research and launching startups, which I’ve dubbed The Grey Zone (and hence the grey arrow). The Grey Zone is that terrible-yet-extraordinarily-wonderful place where you get to work on research topics that feel like they might be commercial products someday. The Grey Zone is fantastic because… It’s an easy sell for under/graduate students because not all of them want to be professors. Some fully recognize that working on a practical…