Open Ended Questions
I’ve been wanting to post on the topic of Open Ended Questions for some time but haven’t been able to formulate my thoughts properly. One of the things that I think defines a person as an engineer is the ability to put forth potential solutions to open ended questions which may have several answers. I am particularly discussing questions where there is not one ideal solution but rather a series of tradeoffs and the person answering the question must justify their choices. One of the things I tried to do in the classes I taught this past year was to keep some questions open ended to see how students would formulate their answers. In some cases, this was successful but in others, not so much. The other thing that struck me as strange is there wasn’t always a connection between a student’s standing and their ability to answer open ended…
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…
Imaginary STEM labor shortage
The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is not training employees and keeping them. Zig Ziglar Back when the economy wasn’t in the dumpster, I was talking to a friend who works at one of those Internet (with a capital I) companies. He was complaining about their inability to find people with the right qualifications. After spending time talking with him, I ascertained that what his company really wanted was for someone in the same position at a different company to be laid off so that they could hire them. His company had a very exacting list of qualifications and wasn’t willing to train any potential employees. They wanted someone off the shelf, so to speak, and weren’t going to take anyone without those qualifications. On the other hand, they would wait months rather than train the employees themselves. It didn’t make much sense to me at the time. FrauTech has…
Soul Sucking Training
We all know there are plenty of issues with meetings in the workplace. And Allison Green over at Ask a Manager even did a piece on making sure your meetings are productive. But lately I’ve been thinking about another kind of work meeting: the training seminar. Whenever a procedure’s being changed ever poor engineer, planner, and specialist often has to sit through an hour of training to learn what the new process is. One of my major beefs is that often training is not customized. Sometimes you end up in the same room with individuals who use the software for hours every day to its full capabilities and others who are not familiar with it at all. The way a designer looks at software can be very different from the way someone in configuration or manufacturing might use that same software. One might be overly familiarized with a certain side…
Professional Development Workshop
Once a year, my school provides a Professional Development Seminar for postdocs and late-stage PhD students. It’s a lottery to get in, and this year I got a spot in the class. I was really excited about this opportunity – the class is taught by professional (of course) teachers, and is only open to 12 people, to keep the setting personal and interactive. I wasn’t sure what to expect out of the workshop. As I understand it, companies in industry will sometimes provide these programs to their employees, to develop them for management. The program that I participated in, however, was a program normally geared for professors. I didn’t know that there were development seminars aimed at professors – and man, what a good idea. The skills involved in being a professor are quite different that the skills needed as a student, even a PhD or postdoc student. You have…
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…