Getting my groove back
Last week, I complained on my own blog about how I wasn’t looking forward to school starting. In the meantime, it has started, and I’ve made it through the first week of classes. Now that I’m starting to get back in the groove, I’m looking at things a different way. First, as much as I love summer, I like the fact that my life is now moving back into a predictable, albeit busy, routine. I have certain days I’ll be teaching, certain days where I take my dogs to class, certain days I’ll be running my kids to events, and certain meetings that I simply cannot avoid. Taken as a whole, I really like having a schedule and knowing where and when I need to be a certain place. Summer, with it’s lack of structure, sometimes leaves me feeling a bit lost. Second, I’m happy to be teaching again. 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,…
Weekend Journal: Engineer Tabs
I will never be as good of a guitar player as I am the day of an engineering test. Why? Because I’m a procrastinator. Hell, I’m procrastinating doing some things around the house this afternoon, just to write this post!. And when I procrastinated in school, my distraction of choice was playing the guitar. So to this day, I still associate the two. Learning guitar as a hobbyist and learning electronics as a hobbyist. And my learning process for the former was strikingly similar to how people learn the latter (at least in the practical, hands-on sense). Even more similarities exist when you include institutional learning in the mix. While this article will not be a treatise on the benefits of institutional over hobbyist learning, it will point out where weaknesses may develop and how to possibly better merge the two for an overall more well-rounded student of electronics or guitar. I also limit…
Torture Class 101
So being an engineer is not all fun and games. Personally I think engineers are wired up a little different from others, and our social skills don’t quite fit with what some call normal. I may be talking totally from a personal viewpoint, but as a child at school I think this odd wiring and way of thinking can seriously hamper your abilities. I think that from an early age we are all wired to enjoy and understand different things in different ways. So what did I struggle with – Humanities. So for people who have not come across the high school lesson from hell that is Humanities then I can only explain it as follows. Basically, the school needed to cover a number of subjects and noted that having a set lesson for any one of these may cause a break down in the space time continuum and therefore…