Zero is never a good number
These past few weeks have been insanely busy for me. I alluded to this two weeks ago with my post on how blogging is hard. Obviously, it’s not too hard and you certainly don’t need any credentials to do it (otherwise I’d be screwed) but it is time consuming. And right now, time is one form of currency that I am severely lacking. I managed another proposal submission, which should be my last one for a few months. In addition to that, I was lacking in my classroom preparation and it certainly showed. Plus, I’ve started to take delivery of my equipment for my lab which is very cool but another thing to coordinate. Also, my group is a little bit bigger (one PhD student, one MS student, and now one undergrad). On top of all of that, I’ve had the obligatory “new faculty” events to attend, which is an…
The real problem with school
I have become the bane of my kids’ teachers existence. They go running when they see me. Part of the reason is because I think school isn’t demanding enough. I’m sure they view me as one of those parents who thinks SO highly of their child and wants them to be in advanced everything. Maybe there’s a bit of truth to that, but I have an even more serious reason: I want them to be challenged. The other day while talking to several fellow engineers on Twitter, the discussion turned to failing courses. It turned out that a lot of us had actually failed courses at some point during our career. Yet all of us had gone on to become engineers. Chris made the point that failing teaches us something. While I think it would be better to be given the tools to prevent failure, he is right: failure can…
Why Research?
A couple days ago, GEARS decided to tackle the following set of questions: Why, with the high cost of university tuition, can’t schools have teach-only professors? With a ratio of 20:1 in the classroom and a rate of 100/hour (roughly), why do professors still need to get research dollars? Is it economically feasible to have teaching-only professors? Why doesn’t this happen more? Why do universities have to rely on research funding to stay afloat? We were talking about the demands on researchers and how that prevents better teaching (because so much time is involved chasing funding) and were questioning why not just give up the research side of things? There are a lot of ways to tackle these questions, but I’d like to make a few different points. (I’d also like to mention that GEARS discussed the teaching school alternatives, so I don’t plan on hitting that point again.) The…
Warping young minds
I got a call last week from the electrical engineering department on campus asking if I would teach a class this semester. The class has the potential to be one of the most important classes that they will encounter in school. No, it’s not circuits 1. It’s University Studies. You see, our university requires every freshman to take a class to orient them to living life at a university. My sister went back to school when I started my master’s degree, and she complained to me over and over about how irrelevant the class is. There was a section on, for instance, talking to your roommate about making living arrangements. At this point, she’d moved out of my parents’ house and been living with someone for 12 years! The custom in electrical engineering has been to try to use this class for something better: what specifically do you need to…
Getting started is hard to do
I have a confession to make: I’m a recovering perfectionist. In high school, I was able to breeze through most of my classes. I could procrastinate and still manage to do really good work, even if I didn’t manage to start my homework until the morning it was due. I started taking university classes in high school, and this was only marginally more difficult…I could often get by with starting things the night before. And then I went to a big name college, and found out that I couldn’t procrastinate at all. My perfectionism became a problem in college. Deadlines became terrifying…and still are. It turns out that procrastination is a sign of perfectionism, along with several other signs. People don’t like to start things that they are afraid they can’t do, well, perfectly. I didn’t know I was a perfectionist, however, until I had kids and found out that they were…
School Competition Pt3 – Awards Day
Over the last few weeks I’ve been talking about the Schools Contest held by Chelmsford Engineering Society (CES). The first week I explained the basic background of the contest and then how I take part in the judging process. Well this week its awards time and we get to see who has won! Once again our hosts are Anglia Ruskin University who help out lots with this and other CES events. There was also lots of support from the sponsors including my company ebm-papst UK Ltd who also supply one of the trophies (full list of sponsors at end). The award winners came along and one again put on a great show of the work they have done. For me like some of the other judges it was our first opportunity to see some of them or have a long chat about the work. Its hard to take in 50…
STEM Employment Data
This past weekend, Ken Cid from the US Department of Commerce was nice enough to leave us a comment about the administration’s jobs prospects for STEM workers. The link to their blog is here [figure credit] and the actual report can be downloaded from here. Naturally, this sent us Engineer Bloggers into a tizzy for two reasons. One, They found us! And two, we would actually have to craft some sort of response that might actually be read by government media folks. You’ll probably find a better response from Chris Gammell or FrauTech, who are much better with stats than I am. Sadly, they post later in the week so you’re stuck with me for now. In Summary: The STEM Jobs Report says that 7.6M people or 5.5% of the workforce is employed in STEM fields and over the past 10 years, STEM fields have had more job growth than non-STEM fields. Also,…
School Competition Pt2 – Judgement Day
Last week I introduced the Chelmsford Engineering Society (CES) Competition for schools. As I said before, I was one of the judges, and this week, I want to report back on what I have seen and what stood out. Before I show you the entries that stood out, I first want to run though the background information about the contest so you better understand the whole day. My day started at the Marconi Building, which is on the Anglia Ruskin University complex, at 8:15am for registration. I was one of 42 judges taking part on the day. We were being supported by members of the CES, who were organising and helping log scores. We are all paired up with another engineer who we have not meet before; I was with a chap called George who, in his day, used to make TV Camera tubes before it all went solid-state. Each…
Keeping Face
Making mistakes is easy, I do them all the time! However, what we do about them is more important. In this week’s theme of “mistakes,” I can easy spend time telling you about the mess I have gotten into and how I should have been more careful, but there’s nothing I can do about them. So I want to talk about keeping face after making mistakes. We all know that moment when your heart sinks, your skin turns cold and you start to sweat. Your first reaction is “Oh God What Have I Done!” and then you start to pray no one else has seen your massive mistake and your hoping you can run away and hide – no one will notice will they? It’s not your fault, it has to be someone else who fed you wrong information! Or some faulty device or the fault of the technician –…
Engineering majors most lucrative
We’ve talked several times about salary issues on EngineerBlogs.org. Over time, engineering salaries tend to level off, and one has to go into management to make more money. On the other hand, a new study came out showing that, despite this plateau, engineers make more money over time than high school grads and nearly every other major. If you have an degree in engineering, Education Week reports that you can expect to make $1.1 million more than a high school graduate. (More if you have a graduate degree!) The down side is that engineering is not considered one of the most stable areas of employment…nor was it the most unstable. The report noted that minorities still make a significantly less than their white counterparts, and women are clustered into the lowest earning majors. One thing the study tracked was undergraduate major, but it didn’t…