Carbon is just burnt wood
I’ve been casting occasional glances at other potential jobs recently and one in particular caught my eye – in the woodworking industry. Now if we were making small talk at a party, and you were being polite, you’d say that there’s plenty of engineering to be done with wood, of course – then you’d smile wanly and wander swiftly on to the canapés, thinking “hmm, engineering, indeed.” Normally, I’d be with you on that one, but in this case, there’s a peculiarity involved that I haven’t yet shared with you. The job is in Austria. Let me start again. I’ve been casting glances (etc, you know the drill by now) – in carbon fiber engineering and one position in particular caught my eye. The company designs and builds custom or low-volume parts for the automotive industry. All very high-tech, as I’m sure you’d agree. Except the job is in Austria.…
Knowing Your Norms
An offhand comment about paper writing on Twitter this morning led to an interesting conversation about what different fields consider typical. This brought to mind part of what Miss Outlier was talking about in her post on thought leadership, namely the different expectations she encounters. Every environment has a certain set of rules you’re expected to follow, many of which may not be initially obvious. Academia vs industry is a conversation that comes up semi-regularly here, since we have writers on both side of the fence. In academia, or at least in graduate school, it’s not uncommon to go months without a hard deadline. I don’t think my husband has gone more than a week without a firm deadline since he started his current job. On the other hand, he’s expected to work certain hours, whereas my hours are fairly unregulated. Norms can also be very specific to a small…
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…
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. …
Planning Beyond Graduation
This semester, I’m working with an undergraduate on research, and we’ve had some interesting discussions about preparing for the academic track instead of an industrial path. My graduate institution is a very research-oriented school, and encourages students to follow the academic path. Undergraduate courses are very theoretical, and their senior capstone experience is a small research project. Most students are expected to participate in a research project at some point besides the capstone project. My undergraduate instution was almost exactly the opposite, expecting the majority of students to find jobs in industry after graduation. Students are encouraged to take internships, and the senior capstone project is done as an industrial partnership. Materials science and engineering, courtesy of the “and”, tends to have a much larger research component than other engineering fields, so it’s not so absurd for a department to expect most of their students to go to grad school. However,…
Science Depends on Engineering
Earlier this week, I tweeted about a new paper where an ultrathin (~3 atomic layers) silica glass film was grown on graphene. The group was attempting to study graphene grown on copper-coated quartz, but an air leak changed the reaction conditions, and ended up with pretty cool results. While it’s an impressive result in it’s own right, the structure was predicted in 1932, and it’s amazing how much they look alike. My original reaction to this paper was to geek out over how well theory predicted the results, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the most impressive part was the fact the authors could create the image of the material in the first place. The imaging technology depends on engineers. The bottom image above was taken using annular dark field scanning transmission microscopy, which requires some very complicated and very precise equipment. The STEM used in…
A nicely tailored cell phone
In 2004, there was a huge hulabaloo when President Bush was caught with something beneath his jacket. He was having a debate with John Kerry when he was caught on film with some sort of bulge beneath his jacket. The images were analyzed by Dr. Robert M. Nelson, a photoanalyst from NASA who normally uses his skills on planets and moons, who said the object was consistent with a tube or wire of some sort rather than the wrinkled shirt that Bush claimed it was. It’s unlucky for Bush that his run for office had such unfortunate timing. A current area of research is the concept of the wearable antenna, and such a device might have made a bulging problem in his campaign go away. (Although, of course, we know that it didn’t impact it seriously.) Manufacturing wearable antennas is not easy, however. Many of the current models involve doing…
The Spinning Engineer
Welcome back! I’m thrilled to be officially joining as a full-time author. I hope everyone had a chance to relax a bit over the holidays, and maybe spend a little bit of time on your favorite hobbies. This fall, one of my lab mates introduced my husband and me to a new hobby : spinning. No, not the exercise class, the yarn-making type. While we started with drop spindles, being the gadget-y people we are, spinning wheels were instantly fascinating. When we talk to spinners, they have regularly commented on how engineers take a very different approach to the whole process. Most spinners do it by feel, and trial and error, instead of evaluating everything in terms of gear ratios and frictional forces. The spinning wheel is hardly a new invention, and operates on fundamentally simple principles. Twist is introduced into the fiber based on the treadle rate, and the…
Materials Genome Initiative
One of the big challenges of engineering is the time it takes to get from innovation to production. This year, President Obama announced the Materials Genome Initiative for Global Competitiveness, as a joint effort between industry, academia, and several major government agencies. Materials issues are considered critical both to national defense and energy policy. However, the time to get a brand new material from the lab bench to market tends to be measured in decades. This initiative aims to decrease that time by making foundational data more accessible. Accordingly, one of the major goals of the Material Genome Initiative is to create better open databases for materials information. In biology, with the rise of bioinformatics and data sharing requirements by funding agencies, there are some impressive databases, such as FlyBase and WormBase, each devoted to a particular organism. However, there are a number of challenges that arise when trying to share materials data. One…
Materials Science and Engineering: Because Everything is Made of Something
Hello! I’ve been a reader and commenter here on Engineer Blogs since my first timid steps into the blogosphere. I’m thrilled to be here as a guest blogger, and to represent my little corner of the engineering world: materials science and engineering. I generally find that most undergraduates are unaware of MSE unless required to take an intro course, which includes many mechanical and biomedical engineering students. Part of this is a matter of size; even the largest MSE departments are usually under 100 students per graduating class. It is also very typical that the class size grows dramatically between the 2nd and 3rd year, when students change majors or are finally forced to declare. Another reason has to do with job titles after graduation. Looking through the alum database from my undergraduate institution, job titles are more frequently Process Engineer, Product Engineer, R&D Engineer, or Quality Engineer. We don’t have the…