Weekend Journal — The Value Of School Lies In Opportunity
I’ve been pretty down on higher education lately. Rising costs that don’t seem to equate to raising educational levels, a large amount of mismanagement of funds and schools’ increasingly brazen one-ups-man-ship in terms of building larger buildings and offering unnecessary perks to students. I don’t like it. But I’m a bit hypocritical. I’m a graduate of an engineering program that taught me quite a bit, in buildings that were just a touch larger than they needed to be. Further, I encouraged my wife when she expressed a desire to go back to school this semester to try out a completely different field. So why was I ok with that? Access. In my case, access to facilities. Access to faculty capable of teaching me difficult concepts. And most importantly, access to co-ops and potential employers. Similar reasons abound in my wife’s case, though she’ll be taking many of her classes online,…
So You’re Starting Grad School…
The new school year is rapidly approaching, or has perhaps already arrived for some. As one of the resident graduate students here at EngineerBlogs, I thought I’d offer some advice to anyone embarking on the quest that is the US doctoral degree. On my own blog, I’ve offered advice about questions to ask on visits. So now that you’ve matriculated, what’s next? Accept that everyone is going to have advice, and much of it may be completely irrelevant to your department and situation. Learning to parse large amounts of information to find something relevant is a critical skill in graduate school, so consider this practice. Make sure you have all of the requirements for candidacy/graduation written down in one place. What courses do you need to take? How are your qualifying exams structured? When are you expected to achieve candidacy? In the beginning, you’re still going to have courses, but you’ll want to…
Irreproducibility
I’m not sure how many academics read EngineerBlogs, but I’m curious how many have run into the problem of false results. I personally spent a lot of time trying during my MS trying to reproduce data from various papers only to find there were problems with the results or the set up. I can remember one paper, in particular, that showed an antenna design published by a fairly prestigious group. I used exactly the same software and tried to replicate their design only to find that the results were considerably different than what was shown in the paper. I finally broke down and emailed one of the authors. Their response was that the dimensions given on the design were not correct. The problems are multiplied, of course, if you’re dealing with different software as you may not be able to even get your simulation results to match up. How do…
This class is a joke
Next week, I’ll be finalizing the syllabus for my fall classes. I am again teaching the university studies classes for the electrical engineers. My goal in teaching last year was to help my students develop good study skills and awareness about their learning preferences. I also attempted to teach them some STEM specific skills, like keeping a lab notebook and learning some basic programming, along with helping them try to understand what they were getting themselves into by pursuing a major in engineering. However, in the past two weeks, I’ve been inundated with requests from various people around campus. “Can I give a presentation on X?” where X may or may not be of interest to campus students, especially engineers. I have to admit that this is getting rather annoying as I have a mostly full curriculum. There are times here and there where maybe I have 15 minutes where…
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…
Peer pressure: the real reason engineers don’t play well with others
Last week, I wrote about two engineering stereotypes – the thinker and the tinkerer. When I was attempting to add a bit of data to the fluff, I came across an article in Science Daily about how engineering stereotypes drive counterproductive practices. In particular, they encourage engineering students to engage in practices that are actually harmful in a career. Unfortunately, it wasn’t applicable to last week’s piece, but I found it worth discussing nonetheless. (If you’d like to read the original article, you can find it here.) The premise of the article is that engineering stereotypes are already prevalent in society and that students think about these when interacting with their coursework and classmates. Specifically, “There’s a stereotype that engineers do things by themselves,” Leonardi says. “So when students are asked to work in teams, they think, am I going to be disadvantaged? When I go to the workplace am…
Ask The Readers — Give Me An “A”!
No, this isn’t about grades. I got back from Maker Faire last weekend on Monday. It’s a festival dedicated to science, engineering, ingenuity and creativity. Really it’s a bunch of nerds like me hanging out, showing off their projects and selling their kits and wares. It was amazing. But the thing that struck me most was the native integration of artwork with all of these technology projects. Art and technology have an interesting co-existence. Some people call it “design”, like how “Industrial Designers” are the ones that draw up cars and other items to make them prettified for consumers. Engineering is sometimes the underlying skill set for many types of art, as well. In general though, the forward facing part of a product is the last concern of engineers; really it’s the first thing that consumers see in a product, it’s actually quite important. And all along the way, when…
Hands vs. Heads
We’ve had a few posts recently about jobs recently. Chris’s Weekend Journal said that degrees shouldn’t be necessary to obtain jobs (though they can help) and Sam followed up with a question about ways to establish your pedigree outside of a university degree. I agree with the opinion that it is harder for a non-degreed engineer to get a job as an engineer. The way I have often seen this structured is that the non-degreed engineer gets the job called “technician” where s/he builds for the engineer with the degree. There is a general perception around technical positions, validated by lower salaries and position, that working with one’s hands is less valuable than working with one’s head. People who build the prototypes are valued less than those that design the prototypes/ first articles. Never mind that the technician often needs to re-engineer around the engineer who may be great theoretically, but less…
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…