Storytelling for Engineers
This week, several of my lab mates are off to a large conference. In my field, conferences almost universally entail a talk of some sort, usually 10 or 15 minutes with Powerpoint slides. For most young presenters, this time limit is a huge challenge, because they are fixated on showing all of the details to validate their results. Their slides are busy, without too much information for anyone to parse in the 60 seconds they have that slide up. Consequently, they rush through a lot of material, leaving their audience unsure of what they just heard. The advice I was given by my first research advisor was to tell a story, focus on what the moral of the story is, and only give the details needed to lead the audience where you want them to go. Some of the best presentations I’ve seen have slides with a single well-designed graph.…
Building Momentum
These past two months have been pretty crazy because it was effectively the playoffs for proposal season (NSF, DARPA, NIST, etc…). For you football fans out there, you can probably appreciate this analogy: I’ve had five completions in 3 weeks and now I’m sitting back and hoping for some nice YAC. That, combined with the time I spent with my students last semester is finally starting to gain traction on its own. The students working in my group don’t have any specific classes that train them to work on my specific research area so I’m left with the task of tutoring and training them in the lab on procedures and whatnot. Basically, my summer and first semester was spent training and acquiring equipment. And I can officially say: My group haz momentum! Yesterday, I was in the lab working on a few things and showing my student some new tips/tricks…
TMI from your Advisor?
One of the things that I think an advisor should do is train their students technically (duh!) but also train them about the social-political-monetary issues of working in a competitive environment. I’m not talking about force my students to be Democrats or Republicans, but rather that they should understand that things are much more interlinked than they might believe. For my students that are pursuing academia, I hope that I’m giving them an accurate representation of what it takes to be in the same role that I’m in. For my students that will end up in industry, I hope this at least gives them some insights and clues for what to look for when they’re deciding on a company. I’ll give you a few examples of what I’m talking about. All of my students (4) are currently paid out of startup money, which I’m using to seed projects that I’m…
Real Life Examples of My $100K+ Education At Work
I’m convinced that in my job, I use 95% of the material covered in engineering school less than 5% of the time. Most of what I do boils down to on the job experience or falls in the category of project management. In many cases, not much would separate me from a talented hobbyist or tinkerer. Of course, this makes me question the value of my education. Why did I spend all that time learning all that stuff? I’ve considered it for a while, and I like to tell myself that the 5% of the time I really use my degree is what makes me valuable as an employee. In a tangential line of discussion, there’s also been a fair bit of talk in the news recently about the workforce, the number of engineers trained in the US, and why so many STEM students change majors. One line of reasoning…
Why a Postdoc is basically needed in Academia
I’ve been totally swamped with proposal writing over the past few weeks, hence my erratic posting schedule. Also, right as I was going to sit down and work on a post, I found out that I was denied for another proposal, totally sapping any motivation to do anything useful. For those of you keeping score, I’m 0-5 in the my first 6 months with a bunch pending. That’s not what I would call a stellar start to my academic career. Needless to say, I’ve contemplating career choices and shoulda-woulda-couldas, but I think that’s only natural at points when things aren’t going the way you envisioned. It’s not all bad; I did get very good reviews from my Chair, which means in the Chair’s eyes I’m doing some things right even though I don’t feel like it is. One of the proposals that rejected was in a Young Investigator/Young Faculty category. For those of…
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…
Planning Beyond Graduation
This semester, I’m working with an undergraduate on research, and we’ve had some interesting discussions about preparing for the academic track instead of an industrial path. My graduate institution is a very research-oriented school, and encourages students to follow the academic path. Undergraduate courses are very theoretical, and their senior capstone experience is a small research project. Most students are expected to participate in a research project at some point besides the capstone project. My undergraduate instution was almost exactly the opposite, expecting the majority of students to find jobs in industry after graduation. Students are encouraged to take internships, and the senior capstone project is done as an industrial partnership. Materials science and engineering, courtesy of the “and”, tends to have a much larger research component than other engineering fields, so it’s not so absurd for a department to expect most of their students to go to grad school. However,…
EngineerBlogger haz media buzz about invention!
Our very own Cherish has been scheming in the lab lately and came up with something really cool. If you haven’t heard about it, Cherish and two other researchers at North Dakota State University have developed a patent pending, thin RFID tag for metal objects. The main press release (i think) is here. You can read more about it here, here, and here. In a nutshell, RFID tags don’t work too well on metal objects because the metal object causes interference and signal loss. Previous methods to solve this problem required bulky objects to be placed outside of the metal object which could be easily damaged during transportation. Cherish’s RFID tag is only about 3 mm thick, which meets standards for these sorts of tags. First off, let me congratulate Cherish and her team for a job well done. Coming up with a workable, commercially viable solution to a problem…
Grad vs Undergrad Teaching Styles
Last semester, I started my first official school year off teaching a senior level undergraduate class. This was a required course that was, from my understanding, a softball in recent years. I decided that I needed to set a different tone for the class than what might have been set in previous years. Incidentally, that tone got me quite a lot of “not very approachable” reviews on my semester student ratings. I find that odd because I never turned away a student from my door and I answered emails all throughout the night. Shrug. But I digress… This semester, I’m teaching a grad class of my design. And there are two distinct differences from teaching an undergraduate class: 1) it’s a free-for-all on material and 2) I find that I’m much more lackadaisical about grad classes. I’ll expound on those thoughts, reverse chronologically because it makes more sense that way. Lackadaisical Approach…
Needy Students: The Ultimate Motivator
This week’s theme at Engineer Blogs is motivation and, if you can’t tell from my late post, I’m motivated to work on other things right now. My discussion on this topic is highly linked to a previous Theme Week on Deadlines. In that post, I discussed how I toss in procrastination and deadlines, and mix it with pressure and a dash of biting-off-more-than-you-can-chew and come out in reasonable shape (when it’s all over). GMP had a comment that she worked in a similar fashion, so I was somewhat relieved to find out I wasn’t the only one. When it comes down to it, I think I’m most motivated by not wanting to let other people down. I’d like to think that I’m the person that comes through 10 times out of 10 (SHAFT!). That doesn’t mean I’m always successful (hence my recent proposal rejection) but in the context of coming through in the end, I’m…