Needing more than two PhDs to file taxes
This past week was the deadline for the joyous occasion of filing your 2011 taxes. This was the first time that DrWife and I have had to file taxes in the US in several years due to being overseas. For us, filling out our tax forms was a soul crushing lesson that simple math eludes us. At least we got a happy ending. In short, we’ve learned that either more education than two PhDs in Mechanical Engineering is needed to fill out your tax forms or the IRS and Congress needs to simplify the tax process. [Before I go on, I want to put a disclaimer in here. This post and forum is not meant to be a political statement one way or the other. Constructive criticism and comments will always be accepted. This is not meant to devolve into a political discussion about which political party contains the more out-of-touch…
Some Thoughts on Mentoring
There have been some great posts on networking and impostor syndrome in the science blogosphere lately, which has prompted me to do some thinking about one of those pieces of advice that always crops up in such discussion: finding a mentor. It’s pretty generally accepted that mentorship matters at every career stage, but as someone early in my career, it seems that the first advice I’m given when I’m struggling is “find a mentor”. One mistake I think most of us make at least once is assuming that because we report to someone, they will serve as our mentor. Maybe it’s because finding a mentor is actually not a straightforward process. I can’t write a flow chart that will consistently find someone a mentor. Personally, I’ve generally found mentors simply by talking to professors outside of class, about something other than class, or talking to professors who I no longer take…
The Grey Zone
This week, as part of Theme Week, we’re discussing our roles as engineers and how it might change depending on the level/status of the company. Now, I’ve already started by breaking the rules about our little post figure because my ‘company’, SnowU is actually a research university which deals heavily with the research end of the spectrum. However, my area within the spectrum is slightly different because I like to think that my research is right on the border between fundamental research and launching startups, which I’ve dubbed The Grey Zone (and hence the grey arrow). The Grey Zone is that terrible-yet-extraordinarily-wonderful place where you get to work on research topics that feel like they might be commercial products someday. The Grey Zone is fantastic because… It’s an easy sell for under/graduate students because not all of them want to be professors. Some fully recognize that working on a practical…
Training Professors to be Educators
The Atlantic had an interesting article entitled The Forgotten Student: Has Higher Education Stiffed its Most Important Client? which parallels a recent Op-Ed in the NYTimes on why one former executive left Goldman Sachs because they lost sight of their client. I remember reading the NYTimes Op-Ed over breakfast and I thought to myself, “I really wouldn’t want to work in a place that wasn’t looking out for the best interests of their client.” After reading the article in The Atlantic, I think the veil has been completely lifted from my eyes. I guess I should explain that. This is not to say that everything in the article was totally foreign for me and that I have never thought about some of those things. However, I never really thought of it from the view that administrators might be failing their clients. For example, there’s discussions here and here on college…
The Future of Education
The Overiew I recently signed up for 6.002: Circuits and Electronics, an introductory level course and the first course available from MITx, MIT’s free, online school. Unlike MIT’s Open Course Ware, which has an incomplete selection of videotaped classroom lectures (some courses are more complete than others) and assorted problem sets, the MITx course has been designed from the ground up to be completed online. Each “week” of class has two lecture sequences, a homework set, and a lab. The lecture sequences each take about an hour and a half to complete, and are broken up into 2-5 minute segments. Some segments feature virtual chalkboard sessions, others feature clips from actual classroom demonstrations. Occasionally, the professor will ask you to solve a simple problem in the middle of class to reinforce a point. The video segments then switch to an untimed online mini-quiz. The student answers in a text field and get…
Work Hard, Play Hard?
DrWife sent me an article that she read titled Why we have to go back to a 40-hour work week to keep our sanity by Sara Robinson at AlterNet which makes a compelling case for why the 40 hour work week was initiated and why it’s need for us to be economically successful as a society. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you do so now. It’s OK, I can wait. … There, all finished. The article essentially discusses how people are not that much more productive working more than 40 hours per week (or 8 hours in a day) and the work efficiency drops off significantly. There are many facets to discuss based on this article, ranging from the current unemployment level in the US to the work-life balance that many of us would like and overall human rights issues that the NY Times has pointed out in articles about China’s…
The Art of Mathematics [Part 1 of 3] (by Carmen Parisi)
Some time ago while stumbling around online I came across a rather interesting essay about the state of mathematical education. Entitled A Mathematician’s Lament, it was written back in 2002 by Paul Lockhart who argues that there is next to no real math being taught at the K-12 level. His essay calls for a radical reform of the educational system to change the way the public perceives mathematics. Years later in 2009 Lockhart expanded the original 25 page essay into a 140 page book which is currently for sale. I find Lockhart’s essay to be thought provoking and though I agree with him on a few of his overall points, I take issue with a decent portion of his argument. In what’s to become a three part series I will discuss Lament and include my own objections to Lockhart’s argument. A Mathematician’s Lament opens with the hypothetical world wherein which…
Weekend Journal — Continuing Education And The Role of College
This week we’ve been inadvertantly talking about education on Engineer Blogs. It’s a large gap to cross from student to engineer, one that many people say you can never truly cross over, due to the demands of an engineering job. But in the midst of this debate, we’ve hit upon a little bit of controversy, which I’d like to analyze (hey, I’m an engineer!). If you’d like some context, feel free to read Miss MSE’s initial article about story telling, GEARS insistence that the humanities majors are asked to take STEM classes and Sam’s followup about things he’s learned since school. I’ve now written about 1000 words on this subject, taking both sides of the debate, none of which you’ll be seeing. I’m really torn and I tried taking comments to heart from people on Twitter and the comments sections of those other articles. The question is whether an education should be…
Useful Things I Have Learned That Engineering School Never Taught Me
I had this post written already, but think it’s an appropriate response to recent articles from GEARS and from Miss MSE about which humanities classes I thought should have been part of my education. I’ve been out of school for several years now and along the way I’ve picked up a few things that made me say “Why didn’t they teach that to me before!?!?” Now, brace yourself, fellow engineers, because I’m not talking about some arcane science or deep mathematical insight. I’m talking about the general disciplines that fall into the field I think of as the Liberal Arts. Of course, when I was student, I rolled my eyes and thought that Liberal Arts meant things like studying Art History of the Early to Late Middle Renaissance, and wondered how it would get me a job. Now, I see the Liberal Arts as a set of “soft” skills that…
Require Humanities Students to Take Core STEM Classes
Last week, Miss MSE discussed how engineers must be capable of telling a good story in order to effectively communicate scientific information. At the end of her post, Miss MSE discusses how she “generally in favor of humanities requirements for engineers” and has discussed more on it here. I wrote a brief comment stating that I am not in favor of humanities requirements for engineers and I want to clarify it more here. Just a forewarning, I’m going to start overly broad and then narrow down to the specific argument. We (as a society) tend to have grandiose discussions surrounding education. Philosophically, we try to construct curricula to challenge and stimulate the mind. In theory, that’s a great thing that we should strive for. But in the society we live in (today), I don’t think it’s possible for students to learn a compendium of topics ranging from art to zoology…