Category Archives: Engineering Mindset

This week I received an email from Chris telling us what the theme was – The things that made us who we are, the turning point. Chris suggested in his email we could consider the people that helped make it happen, our teachers and mentors. But what happen if you had none of them? Well that’s what hit me when I read the email. I don’t consider myself a great engineer, there has been no turning point in my career other than ploughing though 13 jobs. My teachers at school did not inspire me; in fact, I was told when I left school I’d account to nothing because I have Dyslexia. Looking back over 20 years of working in engineering I can’t say any one person has taken me under their wing, sponsored me or guided me. I’ve just been out there doing it on my own. When I started…

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It’s a classic struggle – the logical, practical engineer butting heads with the uncomprehending, inefficient business major (see: all of Dilbert). Or wait – is it instead the visionary manager struggling to focus a socially inept engineer puttering off on a inscrutable tangent? (See: popular portrayals of mad scientists.) Somehow, engineers and business people always struggle with communication. As much as it’s beaten into us that the best teams are made of diverse people, both technical and managerial, somehow, in practice, collaboration between the parties is always painfully difficult. Why is this? Partly it’s the way that business people and engineers perceive each other. I’m currently a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering, but my minor is Entrepreneurship, which means I’ve taken a good number of classes in the business school. I’ve had to deal directly with the stereotypes that business students have when perceiving engineering students, and also with my…

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I decided to try taking our topic for the week–the perception of engineers and the field of engineering–and turn it on its head: What do engineers think of the rest of the world? Some would say, “Who cares?”. Duly noted. If you don’t think engineers are worthwhile, you probably don’t care what they think of you or anyone else. Of course, if you don’t think engineers are worthwhile, you’re probably on the wrong site/side of town. Hint: you’re surrounded, get out while you can. The engineers I’ve met over the years, both in my career and around the web, have generally been quite a benevolent people. In general, we don’t hold ourselves above other professions because we understand systems, including social systems (though some would say engineers are lacking social skills, stepping back and looking at social systems seems different somehow). For example, an engineer might look at a widget…

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While running kids to school this morning, I heard a commercial talking about new cell phone service and how it wasn’t due to magic, i.e. the Telecommunications Fairy.  The commercial failed to tell us how this new service came to be: that is it was due, in part, to the work of engineers.                   This is probably a step back from the story one of my EE profs told me in grad school.  He had just received his PhD in electrical engineering when a neighbor came over.  The neighbor was complaining because his furnace was on the fritz, and he was hoping my prof could help him fix it.  My prof responded that he hadn’t studied that model in school. It used to be that engineers were perceived to be fairly close to mechanics or electricians.  During the space race, they were…

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I’m quickly learning the merits of downtime. Like many engineers out there, I’m always active. I feel lazy if I don’t get something done in a day, no matter how trivial. I am driven by progress and affecting my external environment. I like that I can make stuff, break stuff, create stuff and destroy stuff. However, significant others (SOs) often disagree that this should consume the majority of an engineer’s time. I’ve been encountering this recently and couldn’t agree more. While my work schedule has exceedingly regular hours (and light by some standards of engineering positions), my extracurriculars such as this website, a radio show, a design contest, a consulting business and a couple other things sprinkled in there seem to take up the majority of my remaining time. So I put myself in the same bin as people that are overworked, with long hours and stressful workdays (I had…

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The theme this week is networking and jobs – there has been discussion on the people above us who help, friends who help,  and the fact that sometimes knowing people doesn’t directly help at all. We’ve discussed how networking is a bunch of meaningless jargon, it’s really just common sense used to help you be successful (preach it, GEARS!) – and then hell froze and we got a networking guide from an engineer. 🙂 I just got back from a conference last week, where I was an organizer. There has been a lot of talk during this week about conferences as prime networking events for engineers, but it’s all been from the perspective of an attendee or presenter. It’s quite a different experience from the organizing side – and quite exhausting! So the subject I want to address today is networking burnout. I want to know if anybody else out there experiences this – do you find…

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My alter-ego is a geophysicist because, somewhere along the line, I decided I didn’t want to be sitting at a desk all day.  I was under the impression that because geologists are outside all day, geophysicists must be, too.  There is some truth to that argument, but it turns out to not be applicable to the types of geophysics in which I am interested. However, being a geophysicist has given me plenty of opportunity to hang out with geologists, and sometimes they have strange ideas.  On the other hand, it was actually another engineer with an interest in geology that gave me the strangest idea of all.  In fact, he offered me a beer if I could follow through on his idea.  (This is standard fare among geology folk, but I opted for a handmade milkshake from the local hole-in-the-wall burger joint near campus.) This particular friend, along with several…

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