dr. versus , Ph.D.
I, like many of my academic colleagues, have been extremely busy these past few weeks (hence the lack of posts) with finishing the semester. There’s final projects to be turned in, finals to be graded, last minute faculty meetings, and things like commencement weekend which really eat into your time. Since this is my first semester as an assistant professor and I teach a required senior level course for all mechanical engineering majors, I decided to attend commencement weekend. For those of you that don’t know, when you receive your PhD (Doctorate of Philosophy), you’re hooded as part of the commencement ceremony. When you’re a faculty member, you’re supposed to were the academic regalia of your university (where you received your Ph.D.) and your hood. I ran into two small problems while preparing for commencement: 1) I was never hooded as part of the formal ceremony and 2) my university…
Weekend Journal — The Good Ol’ Degreeless Days
I’m not someone who is prone to nostalgia often. First off, I haven’t been an engineer that long, at least in comparison to many of my peers. Being the “new guy” (or gal) can really prevent being nolstalgic about the old days. However, I find I’m becoming more so when I try to hire people. Hunh? You see, I know a decent chunk of engineers who I’d love to hire. I know I’d like to hire them because I’ve seen their work, I’ve talked to them about electronics and I know that they know their stuff. I feel confident that whatever they don’t currently know, they would quickly go out and learn to the best of their ability and apply it to the situation I’ve placed them in. However, in reviewing their work and credentials, I see that there isn’t an undergraduate degree on their resume. FULL STOP. Is this…
Bring Back Manufacturing
Recently, there has been a significant amount of rhetoric by President Obama on how we need to re-establish manufacturing in the United States. This topic was front-and-center in the State of the Union speech in January. Additionally, President Obama has been touring the country, speaking at universities, businesses, campaign stops, and fundraisers about how we can boost our economy by emphasizing manufacturing. The President, thankfully, has backed this initiative with a serious amount of funding. Much of the following information is paraphrased from Manufacturing.Gov, the website detailing the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation. In a nutshell, the government is looking to fund up to 15 Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation in the next year backed by up to $1 Billion in funding. The pilot institute, with a focus on Additive Manufacturing, will be funded using FY2012 funds, meaning it will be awarded before the end of September. These Institutes will primarily…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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. …
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…