Looking over the fence
My husband, Mr.ME and I often compare notes on what it’s like being in industry versus graduate school as part of our “how was your day” discussions.He graduated the year before I did, so it’s interesting to see what it would be like if we’d taken the other route after graduation. Of course, not all graduate schools are the same, nor are all jobs the same, but we decided to offer some tag team insight into what our experiences have been like. Describe your job Miss MSE: I’m a graduate student in materials science at a major research university. My research is to study the structure of amorphous solids by molecular dynamics simulations. This is a major departure from what I did as an undergraduate, which was classical metallurgy. Mr. ME: I’m a mechanical engineer responsible for the design of a key subsystem for a consumer product produced by a major OEM. …
Competitive teamwork
I was having lunch with some coworkers today, and one of them started talking about another place where he worked. He was saying that people were ranked individually and as a team, and when the company would hit hard times, people at the low end of the totem pole would get tossed. I was a bit horrified hearing this, and then he said this was a pretty good situation. Apparently at another company with which he’d worked closely, people were ranked solely as individuals with no regard to the team. This meant that there was very little incentive to cooperate with teammates – if you helped your teammate, that meant you were decreasing the odds that your teammate would get canned and upping them for yourself. In other words, it seems to encourage backstabbing and secrecy. Almost all of us agreed that we would not enjoy working in that sort…
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…
ProE Etiquette
How well you get along with your coworkers can have a huge impact on how effective an engineer you can be. I’m not just talking about meetings, but how well you can collaborate on projects. People generally know you don’t pass off shoddy work or incomplete projects to the next person who has to work on it for you. But sometimes I’ve seen exactly that in the design world. Even though most CAD programs track everyone who touched that part or drawing, people seem to think they can get away with things they generally wouldn’t try in a report or presentation. A couple months ago Peter J Francis asked whether MCAD or ECAD was more trouble than it was worth. GEARS discussed his love hate relationship with it but admitted that the skills he learned with ProEngineer allowed him to really kickstart his career. Skills with a particular CAD or…
Weekend Journal: Burn Out
I’m not there yet. I’m not burned out beyond repair, nor do I plan to get to the point where I throw my hands in the air and say, “That’s it!” and walk away from engineering. No, haven’t gotten to that point yet. But I have been getting close. I have been very lucky lately to have picked up a part time consulting gig. I work full time during the day at a company that allows me to work in a non-related, non-competitor field at night, so there’s no conflict of interest. I really appreciate that. So at night after I get off of work for the day I drive home, eat dinner and start working on my consulting work for the evening. I am lucky enough to be working on a fun challenge, that happens to be design work. It’s also slightly outside of my main expertise, so I…
Moral engineering
Do you have any moral issues about your work? I have, off and on. I consider myself a pacifist, and yet I’ve found myself working through the years for projects that were funded by the Department of Defense. About a decade ago, I would’ve said it would never happened…but things change. The first project didn’t strike me as anything to be concerned about: we were studying magnetic fields originating in the ionosphere. While the defense wing we were working with needed this information, it was fundamental science that could be used for a lot of things. Lately, a lot of the work I’ve done has involved sensors or communication devices. While I initially worried that working on these items was hypocritical, I have realized that it isn’t. Much of what we work on is also being developed for commercial markets. Maybe working on RFID, for example, enables item tracking for the military, but…
My Cooperative Edge
Honestly, I came up with this week’s theme (“how’d you get to where you are today”) based on my desire to write about my own experience. Actually, it was in response to Miss Outlier’s post about variation in engineering education. The recently departed Fluxor (miss ya buddy!) and I had previously discussed how my school wasn’t as thorough on all fronts of electrical engineering; however, our curriculum was supplemented by something called a “co-0p”. And in fact it was the reason I went the the school I did in the first place. So, what’s a co-op? A co-op (or “cooperative education”) is when you take 8-9 months and don’t go to school. Sounds like fun, eh? Just sit around all day and play video games or something? Well, no. Actually, during that time, you’re out in industry working for a company. With a salary and everything. And in most cases, you’re doing actual work for…