Year Two Began Anew…
…and it’s kicking my ass, as you can probably tell from my lack of posting. Last October, I posted on how I was diving right into the deep end (see: What’s the difference between 18 and 27?) because my feeling was that academia is sink or swim and those that can cope will, and those that can’t cope won’t. I was most decidedly in the camp that thought they could cope and things would be easier once I got a grant or two under my belt. This led to a, shall we say, promiscuous year applying for any and all proposal solicitations that were remotely in my area (~10 NSF-length proposals, and ~10 smaller opportunities). I wanted to make sure I got some funding in the first year to get off to a good start. It turns out that when you get more than 1 or 2 grants under your belt,…
Irreproducibility
I’m not sure how many academics read EngineerBlogs, but I’m curious how many have run into the problem of false results. I personally spent a lot of time trying during my MS trying to reproduce data from various papers only to find there were problems with the results or the set up. I can remember one paper, in particular, that showed an antenna design published by a fairly prestigious group. I used exactly the same software and tried to replicate their design only to find that the results were considerably different than what was shown in the paper. I finally broke down and emailed one of the authors. Their response was that the dimensions given on the design were not correct. The problems are multiplied, of course, if you’re dealing with different software as you may not be able to even get your simulation results to match up. How do…
Speaking engineer
The most difficult aspect of being on a multidisciplinary team is the fact that you don’t always speak each other’s language. Communication can be a problem. All of us are so immersed in what we do that we know what we need and our limitations. If we knew that the people we were working with didn’t understand those limitations, we would gladly explain them. However, it doesn’t become clear that there’s been a miscommuncation or lack of communication until we’re looking at a project and asking why the person didn’t do things a different way. From my perspective, it’s a bit difficult to do modeling and then hand my work to someone who will make the thing I’ve modeled. Often, the way I’ve designed the model isn’t exactly the way the object needs to be built. Then the question is whether the model is a sufficient representation of the device.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
ZOMG! I Haz Survived!
If you can’t tell from the title or the picture, the semester is over! I’ve made it through a 4-month whirlwind of activity, craziness, anxiety, and, not to toot my own horn, success. Going into this semester, I thought I had a good idea of what it took to be tenure track material (I mean, I got the job didn’t I?!?). That last month though, was a little rough at times. All in all, I think everything went about as well as it could go for my first semester teaching. I’ve read some of the comments from my class survey (I’ll discuss more in a later post) and many were of the flavor, “I was a little apprehensive about this class with a new prof and given that this was his first time teaching, it was a lot better than expected and things went well.” That’s encouraging for the future. While…