Blast from the Past
I happened to be scrounging through the supply cabinet at work and found this relic of the computing world, a 5.25″ floppy disk. Putting them in the cabinet may have just been someone’s idea of a joke, but it brings up the very real point of dealing with legacy data and compatibility. If there was anything on the floppy, it was probably so old that it couldn’t possibly be important to us anymore, but if it was, the chances of finding a computer on the premises that could read it would be slim to nil. Now as a mechanical engineer, I don’t typically encounter legacy operating systems (COBOL, anyone?), but I have had to dig up some very old technical drawings. I was working on a radar system upgrade and had to pull up technical drawings from the radar’s original construction in the 1960’s. The drawings were stored on microfiche, and…
WTF #16: Things I Didn’t Know About My Father
As I prepare to make my final move to China to take up my new post, I needed a place to store of all the junk my family has collected in the basement over the past decade or so we’ve live in the house. What better place than to use my parents’ basement for the job. But before I could move my stuff there, I first needed to help my parents clear out all the junk they have collected over the past several decades. As I was rifling through this and that, I came upon a stack of notebooks. What’s this? US Navy documents? Hmm… And then the next notebook. And the next… And so on. Surface Warfare Officers School Command? This has certainly piqued my interest. For most of my father’s career in the private sector, he was a marine engineer, helping to build huge seafaring cargo vessels. Sometimes,…
Degree? We don’t need no stinkin’ degree!
In the weekend journal, Chris Gammell wrote an interesting post about the “good ol’ degreeless days,” in which he writes about trying to hire someone without a degree. I’d like to respond with some of my thoughts on the problem, focusing on the flip side of the coin: getting hired without a degree. I see a degree, at least for those fresh out of school without an established career, as a proof of competence. Trying to get hired without a degree, naturally means finding another way to convincingly demonstrate that you have the necessary skills. In other words, “show me what you can do.” Now in some fields of study, I think this is perfectly reasonable. For example, compsci majors can go develop a web sever or an app and graphic design students have a portfolio. In some fields, however, the resources required to build a portfolio are just unreasonable…
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…
Weekend Journal — You Don’t Need Permission
Though I’m an engineer, I don’t necessarily consider myself a natural tinkerer. Sure, I started out that way, as most kids do. My childhood inspirations included Legos, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets and lots of toys that are precursors to engineering. But as I got older, I didn’t step into many of the other stereotypical “future engineer” activities. I never learned how to change a car’s oil or do regular maintenance. I never framed a house or similar structures. I never built a computer from components at the store (though this is obviously more relevant around the time I grew up vs 20 years prior). I never got a ham license or had a 200 in 1 electronics kit, two things that almost guarantee a future as an electrical engineer. So what gives? My parents were both very supporting and continue to be to this day. And I regularly worked on…
Anything For A Quiet Life? Working At An Established Company
Editor’s Note: We’re doing a theme-week (starting mid-week, yes) here at Engineer Blogs about how engineering roles change as the company changes. Obviously there are some differences in what an engineer is expected to do in a fledgling company versus a near-death company. Our writers will detail a company (or multiple companies) they have worked in and how their role fit in with their organization. Let’s talk about the principle of Established. The very word inspires… nothing. It raises images of crusty librarians, besuited commuters in trains escaping the teenaged family, judges in wigs, stasis. Yet those very images are perfect camoflage for the turmoil going on behind the scenes – and turmoil is interesting whichever way it is bubbling. So, yes, I’d like to write about my experiences at an established company. How established? Very established. My company’s founder worked alongside Henry Ford himself, supplying him with parts made…
Why It’s Still Necessary to Build Real Hardware
CAD modeling, virtual prototyping, and 3-d printing all have their place; but at the end of the day, You Still Need to Build Real Hardware. In this post, I’ll share a few examples of my own hard won knowledge that no book or classroom lecture ever covered. The real lessons of the day came from some time in the shop with experienced and very talented machinists. I was doing work designing a socket drive to connect a steel shafted motor to an aluminum component. The socket and motor were both modeled in CAD, tolerance stackups were taken into account, and we had something like a .0025″ clearance between the walls of the socket and the drive shaft. The parts came from the machine shop, and like a little kid on Christmas, I tore open the packaging and started putting parts together. We put the mechanism (and associated motor) through it’s paces and…
Looking over the fence
My husband, Mr.ME and I often compare notes on what it’s like being in industry versus graduate school as part of our “how was your day” discussions.He graduated the year before I did, so it’s interesting to see what it would be like if we’d taken the other route after graduation. Of course, not all graduate schools are the same, nor are all jobs the same, but we decided to offer some tag team insight into what our experiences have been like. Describe your job Miss MSE: I’m a graduate student in materials science at a major research university. My research is to study the structure of amorphous solids by molecular dynamics simulations. This is a major departure from what I did as an undergraduate, which was classical metallurgy. Mr. ME: I’m a mechanical engineer responsible for the design of a key subsystem for a consumer product produced by a major OEM. …
Parlez-vous engineering?
An article in the Guardian newspaper today drew my attention to a rather stunning online archive of drawings and sketches from the engineers who designed and built Britain’s railway network in its 19th and early 20th century heydey. I heartily recommend you have a browse here. Whilst that collection is certainly a wonderful resource, I have a rather ambivalent relationship to engineering drawings. Like butterflies pinned into collection books, they are a fixed, dead representation of what once was an idea fluttering merrily through an engineer’s mind. Throughout the initial phases of concept and the first wobbly-lined and crossed-out sketches, to 3D CAD models spinning and rotating on the monitor, through to prototypes, parts take on a life of their own. They grow from chrysalis to caterpillar, evolve before your eyes and then – they are ossified, sectioned, labelled and numbered like any other sample. Their drawings sit there gathering dust on the desk, yellowing…
Awesome Tools For Every Mechanical Engineer
I’m a mechanical engineer. I love mechanical things. My parents gave me lots of Legos to play with as a child and I suppose I never entirely grew out of them. If I had to say what the favorite part of my job is, I’d probably say it’s when parts come in the mail. I mean, it’s like Christmas. Stuff shows up on your desk in a nice box and you get to rip it open and play with what’s inside. How awesome is that? After parts arrive though, there are still the tools to play with. Here are some of the coolest tools out there that I think every mechanical engineer should have. Calipers The first time I played with a pair of calipers, I was maybe 9 years old and following my dad around to a space satellite fabrication facility. An engineer picked a pair of calipers up…