No deadwood here
On Tuesday, I posed a question on my own blog: what would happen if academia required PIs to fund their own salary and not get tenure? To clarify, I don’t think this would necessarily be a good thing…but I also don’t think it would be a bad thing, either. I can see the pros and cons of such a move, and it’s very hard to say if one side would win out. I also think there are several possible outcomes, and I think that it would change from school to school. However, I anticipate a few potential changes to the system that would probably constitute some general trends. 1 – I see groups becoming more bimodal in their distribution: they’ll either be really big so that PIs can keep writing grants like crazy (something that already seems to occur a lot in bio and medical fields) to try to cover their…
Engineering with attitude
A few years ago, I had the unfortunate experience of being in a courtroom with two lawyers. As soon as the judge said that court was in session, both lawyers stood up and began talking simultaneously for several seconds. Eventually, one of them ran out of steam, and I was left with the feeling that the other had ‘won’. I’m not sure what they were going for other than some sort of weird attempt at dominance, and it was a very jarring display. I thought, at the time, that I would never want to be a lawyer. Since then, I’ve been witness to similar things over and over. However, instead of in a courtroom, these arguments involving a lot of confrontation and rude behavior, have taken place in front of white boards, on Skype sessions, on telephone calls, and even at bars. And they always seem to involve engineers…sometimes even…
Engineering a fashion sense
I am seriously jealous of my male engineering colleagues: it’s so easy for them to pick out clothing, and they never have to worry that someone will assume they aren’t an engineer because of their attire. I have decided that it is time for a serious wardrobe upgrade, and I am struggling to figure out what kind of clothes I can and should wear. For years, I’ve been quite happy wearing jeans, sneakers and tshirts or sweaters depending on the weather. This is perfectly acceptable where I work, as there really is no dress code. Unfortunately, this more often than not has left people believing I’m a grad student, or more often, an undergrad…because that’s how a lot of them dress. When I’ve tried to upgrade to wearing more professional clothes, I am assumed to be a secretary, except when I went to a conference recently. At the conference, I…
Patently Absurd
The US supreme court recently struck a blow to biological and pharmaceutical industries. They shot down a patent (and probably several others that use similar technology) on measuring a metabolite as a diagnostic procedure. In other words, even if someone came up with the idea to measure a particular naturally generated substance as a way to diagnose an illness or dose a medication, it’s not patentable. The article in the Chronicle of Higher Education states: Patent claims that merely describe natural phenomena are not patent-eligible, the court said, and the diagnostic procedure outlined in the patents at stake in the case “adds nothing to the laws of nature that is not already present when the steps are considered separately.” It makes sense why this would be problematic in medicine, a field that is facing rising costs. If tests require patents to be administered, this significantly increases the cost and means…
Constant craving
All the literature geeks who read EngineerBlogs probably know that today is the Ides of March. *crickets chirping* However, everyone else probably was celebrating Pi day yesterday. Some of us take our favorite constants very seriously. And some of us eat them. (Yes, I baked that. But not yesterday.) One of my favorite stories about Richard Feynman is how he broke into someone’s file cabinets because he guessed this person had a thing for well-known constants. After incorrectly guessing the person was using the value of pi as the code to the numerical lock, he tried e. He gave this person the scare of his life. Pi is one number that everyone seems to know and love, but I wonder: is it your favorite number, or do you have another? I personally like the value of permittivity for free space (because I used it so much in grad school).…
(mis)communicating your work
If you read my personal blog, you know that I’m on travel for a conference this week. This conference has been much different than the ones I’ve attended before. It was a lot smaller and easier to get to talk to people. I really enjoyed that aspect. Also, I saw a lot of work on areas closely related to fields where I’m working rather than having everything from here to the moon (and, for some conferences, beyond that). Another area where things were different was the poster session. I mentioned on my own blog that the posters were very visual without much text. I typically ‘narrate’ my posters with text, but they’re typically more visual than others I’ve seen at big conferences. However, this time, I was far more wordy than I should have been. I could’ve easily stripped most of the text and left the pictures, making the poster…
Shifting Gears
Yesterday, GEARS wrote about how his lab group seems to be gaining some momentum. This got me to thinking about how I’d recently had my momentum redirected temporarily and ways to handle it better in the future. I am not a person who likes to change what I’m doing very often. I find that it’s hard to redirect my attention to a new project, even if it’s one that I’ve worked on recently. Having a meeting first thing in the morning is like walking through quicksand for a while afterwards. This is a problem, though, as I’m usually working on 3-4 different projects at work; I have to spend a good chunk of my time interacting with other people on my teams to make sure we’re keeping appraised of each others work. However, a few weeks ago, I had a huge lurch. A project deadline was coming up and we…
STEM graduate crunch solved
We’ve been hearing a lot on how there is a huge shortage of STEM workers and how the US needs to have more to stay on top. It looks like our concerns are well on our way to being fixed. The financial sector is apparently downsizing, so all those tech majors who originally planned to go into business and banking are thinking of a career in…you guessed it…engineering! An article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek discusses the fact that the financial sector has been seriously cutting down on hiring. Many tech majors discussed in the article said that they majored in technical fields to get into finance, but now that jobs aren’t available, they’re looking for jobs doing the stuff they were actually trained to do. The article does mention that things are shaky in the tech sector, but says that, “few expect Silicon Valley to undergo the carnage suffered by Wall…
Preparing for…everything!
I’ve probably mentioned before how I never intended to get a degree in engineering. I started college with the notion of being a research scientist, but initially decided I wasn’t scientist material. I spent a couple years switching through various majors and ended up in journalism for a while. I managed to even bag a couple awards for my writing. Fortunately, I ended up being second in line for a journalism position, and when I didn’t get it, decided that I missed physics and should go back to school. One unexpected side effect of this detour in my education is that I got a lot of very valuable experience writing. I didn’t realize it until much later, but a lot of science and engineering revolves around writing, and that background, as useless as it seemed at the time, has come in very handy. As an undergrad back in physics, I…
Not quite shooting from the hip
Most of us can relate to meeting someone new and having them ask what we do. If we’re lucky, the person has a technical background and can understand some or maybe all of what we do. If we’re not lucky, we have to think of ways to explain things that someone without a technical background can understand…and even that doesn’t work well, sometimes. In the past week, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about some of my research. While I consider this a good thing, I had two realizations. First, while I am good at explaining things, I realized that, as a teacher, I often have time to develop explanations before I go to class. It’s much harder when I’m faced with a misunderstanding and only have a short time to figure out how to rectify it. Second, it’s really surprising how much people’s perceptions…