The mother of modern management and the cost benefit of having many children
Lillian Gilbreth is known as the mother of modern management and the first lady of engineering, but most people are more familiar with her simply because she was a mother…of twelve children. In fact, two of her children wrote a memoir of their childhood called “Cheaper by the Dozen.” I am sorry to say I haven’t read the story, but I have read a bit about Gilbreth herself. A few of us have been discussing how we never intended to get into engineer, sort of fell into it. I imagine that’s what happened with Gilbreth. Her father never felt that women needed to have college degrees because they were only going to raise families, but he allowed her to attend UC Berkeley where she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in literature. When she graduated with her BA in 1900, she was the first woman to speak at a…
What did I get myself into?
We’ve decided to occasionally focus a series of posts on themes. You probably noticed that we did this a couple weeks ago when discussing engineering salaries. This week, we’re going to discuss how we each got into engineering. I am guessing that, unlike my fellow bloggers, I got into engineering by accident. That is, I never had any intent to become an engineer, but things worked out that way. I did my undergraduate studies in physics with minors in math and geology, intending to go into computational geophysics after I finished. While I was going to school, I met my husband, who was doing his PhD in electrical engineering. All was well and good until I finished my bachelor’s degree, and he was just starting on his dissertation. Things might have worked out fine, except the closest school with a geophysics doctoral program is four hours away, and I was…
Patent (De)Pending
Yesterday was what I would consider bitterly cold on the high plains. The actual air temperature was around -15°F. I have no idea what the windchill was: I don’t bother checking because it’s usually bad and only makes me feel worse. Despite that, I tucked my lab notebook under my arm along with a mess of paperwork and trekked to the part of campus (i.e. the next building over, which is a long way in the cold) that deals with intellectual property issues. Those of you who read my blog may remember me talking about some easy funding I got for an idea. The idea involved developing a special widget, and my supervisor thought it was an *ahem* novel idea. He was hoping the widget might be patentable. Granted, I may not be Hedy Lamarr, who patented the secret communication device below, but one can always hope that all this excess…
Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.
I like to think that John Kenneth Galbraith was a bit on the cynical side. Still I’ve never been particularly fond of meetings (who is?). Despite trying to learn more about running effective meetings, I’ve lately been developing a list of pet peeves about meetings. Failing to realize that not everyone wants to listen to you hash out details There is nothing more annoying than listening to someone conduct a meeting within a meeting. Honestly, meetings should, for the most part, cover higher level issues on a project, such as progress or difficulties. They are meant to keep everyone on the same page as far as progress goes. They are not a good time to bring up this niggling little issue that’s been giving a person problems but that person failed to ask their coworkers about until they’re sitting down across from them. And double curses on people who carry…
Not in it for the money
When a friend recently found out I was working as an engineer, he said, “I never saw you as the worker bee type.” It was a good assessment of my personality, but not a good assessment of my job. All engineering jobs don’t require one to become a worker bee. Because the theme this week is engineering salary, it’s a good time to talk about what I do and do not expect from a job especially as I hope to go into academia (which, as far as I know, is different from my fellow bloggers here). There is a down side to this career path…or two, rather. The first is the stiff competition for open jobs. (Let’s pretend for a moment that it’s not there.) The second is the pay. As a grad student, I’ve averaged around $20k for an annual salary. That may not sound like a lot, but…
Green electronics – it’s not the soldermask
On last week’s Amp Hour, Chris and Dave were discussing laser etching PCBs. I’m not sure they realized it, but this is actually a fairly hot area in PCB processing research right now, along with printed electronics. Currently, PCBs are processed by copper-cladding a substrate material, like FR-4. There are a couple ways to get the circuit layout onto the board. The first possibility is that the circuit layout is printed onto the board using screen printing. The copper you want to keep is covered in an impermeable ink. A second method uses a photomask. The areas you want to keep are exposed to light, which will harden the mask. The unexposed areas are still soft and removed chemically. The final step in both processes involves removal of unwanted copper using a chemical such as ferric chloride or ammonium persulfate. (Note: A third method can involve the use of a…
Working on an interdisciplinary team
Chris hates working alone. Fluxor has suggestions for interview questions. And some people wonder why you should bother with a behavioral interview. My perspective on some of these this is different because I am working with an interdisciplinary team. In a lot of companies, electrical engineers are separated from mechanical engineers, even when working on the same project. They may approach projects in stages, or maybe they work on completely different things. The wonderful thing about where I work is that I inhabit a world full of electrical engineers, each of whom have a different specialization. There are also a smaller number of mechanical engineers and sometimes we deal with chemists and/or material scientists. Because of the nature of the projects we are working on, we work together relatively closely, probably far more than if we were working at a regular business. Interdisciplinary research has a lot of advantages, but…
The long and sordid history of bisphenol-A
Bisphenol A has recently found to not be safe for food containers, but it has a sordid history in IC packaging.