Weekend Journal — Engineering (Business) Travel
By Chris Gammell on February 19, 2012
I’ve written before about business travel, but this time I’m traveling as a design engineer; last time it was general thoughts on travel after a short stint at a conference as a technical writer. So I decided to consider what engineers need to know in order to work successfully on an overnight trip to a foreign locale. Design engineers aren’t made to travel. We have quirky needs, lots to do back at the lab and massive amounts of baggage (take that one how you want to). However, sometimes the need arises to get off your butt and go see a customer. Other times it’s a supplier. And sometimes you need to go simply because the boss tells you to. Early this week, I’ll traveling for my day job and I thought I’d blurp out my thoughts (that’s right, blurp) before going. While not all of this will be strictly for [...]
Posted in Business, Electrical Engineering, Engineering Mindset, Workplace | Tagged airplane, engineer, hackerspace, tools, travel | 1 Response
Why a Postdoc is basically needed in Academia
By GEARS on February 17, 2012
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 [...]
Posted in Academia, Education, Politics | Tagged funding, postdoc, proposals, research, tenure track, training, YIP | 4 Responses
Preparing for…everything!
By Cherish The Scientist on February 16, 2012
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 [...]
Posted in Academia, Education, Electrical Engineering, Physics | Tagged education, journalism, mcnair, research, undergrad | 2 Responses
Planning Beyond Graduation
By Miss MSE on February 14, 2012
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, [...]
Posted in Education, Materials Engineering | Tagged career, preparation, school | 3 Responses
WTF #4: Illusory Superiority
By Fluxor on February 13, 2012
Illusory superiorty, a.k.a. full of ourselves. This is the only conclusion I can come up with to explain the surprise that all of us felt when FluxCorp decided to shutter our satellite design centre and to layoff my entire design team, save myself (who’s being transferred out-of-country). Last August, our team was re-org’d into a new division. We all thought it was a positive move. The new division’s goals were better aligned with the products we were working on and both our new manager and new director are old guards in this product line. Although we knew that our building lease was soon coming to an end and that an office move was likely in order to save money, we felt confident we would move along with everyone else to the new site. After all, why wouldn’t we? We are “wonderful” designers. We have a good reputation with the people [...]
Posted in Workplace | Tagged career, layoffs, superiority | 7 Responses
Weekend Journal — Recovery
By Chris Gammell on February 13, 2012
I’m on the tail end of a 10 day vacation, the longest I’ve ever taken. If you read my column from last week, you’ll know that it was my delayed honeymoon. I had a blast! I highly recommend Hawaii and as soon as I finish paying off the debts I’ve incurred over the past week, I’m sure I’ll heartily endorse everyone else doing so as well. Anyway, debts aside, I’m interested in talking about something we all experience, whether it be a 10 day excursion on a tropical isle or a 2 day roadtrip to Wisconsin. What do you do when you need to get back to the office? How do you recover from time away from email, project schedules and keeping up with all of those critical updates about your co-workers’ children’s contra-alto clarinet lessons. Either way, how do you catch up? Clear up that inbox, soldier! I think [...]
Posted in Business, Communication | 3 Responses
How good we engineers have it
By FrauTech on February 10, 2012
You may think we here at Engineer Blogs are “glass half empty” folks when it comes to employment and salary expectations for engineers (though really, the glass was poorly designed with too much capacity). I’ve talked about the overhyped STEM recruitment here before. It’s no secret I don’t believe in an engineering or STEM shortage. I’ve looked at engineering employment over time and it doesn’t seem to indicate any increasing demand or a salary increase based on a higher market value for engineering professionals (unless you’re a software engineer). Cherish just wrote last week about engineering being a common background for CEOs. One of our commenters asked whether engineers need really be concerned with having more options beyond the engineering job. As a former non-engineer in the workforce, I can certainly sympathize with this perception. It does seem like an engineering degree is much more the key to a job and [...]
Posted in Economy | Tagged engineering, H1-B, higher education, jobs | 3 Responses
EngineerBlogger haz media buzz about invention!
By GEARS on February 9, 2012
Our very own Cherish has been scheming in the lab lately and came up with something really cool. If you haven’t heard about it, Cherish and two other researchers at North Dakota State University have developed a patent pending, thin RFID tag for metal objects. The main press release (i think) is here. You can read more about it here, here, and here. In a nutshell, RFID tags don’t work too well on metal objects because the metal object causes interference and signal loss. Previous methods to solve this problem required bulky objects to be placed outside of the metal object which could be easily damaged during transportation. Cherish’s RFID tag is only about 3 mm thick, which meets standards for these sorts of tags. First off, let me congratulate Cherish and her team for a job well done. Coming up with a workable, commercially viable solution to a problem [...]
Posted in Business, Communication, Economy, Education, Electrical Engineering, Workplace | Tagged antenna, Cherish, licensing, NDSU, patent, publication, RFID | 1 Response
Not quite shooting from the hip
By Cherish The Scientist on February 9, 2012
Most of us can relate to meeting someone new and having them ask what we do. If we’re lucky, the person has a technical background and can understand some or maybe all of what we do. If we’re not lucky, we have to think of ways to explain things that someone without a technical background can understand…and even that doesn’t work well, sometimes. In the past week, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about some of my research. While I consider this a good thing, I had two realizations. First, while I am good at explaining things, I realized that, as a teacher, I often have time to develop explanations before I go to class. It’s much harder when I’m faced with a misunderstanding and only have a short time to figure out how to rectify it. Second, it’s really surprising how much people’s perceptions [...]
Posted in Communication, Engineering Mindset | Tagged communication | 1 Response
Science Depends on Engineering
By Miss MSE on February 8, 2012
Earlier this week, I tweeted about a new paper where an ultrathin (~3 atomic layers) silica glass film was grown on graphene. The group was attempting to study graphene grown on copper-coated quartz, but an air leak changed the reaction conditions, and ended up with pretty cool results. While it’s an impressive result in it’s own right, the structure was predicted in 1932, and it’s amazing how much they look alike. My original reaction to this paper was to geek out over how well theory predicted the results, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the most impressive part was the fact the authors could create the image of the material in the first place. The imaging technology depends on engineers. The bottom image above was taken using annular dark field scanning transmission microscopy, which requires some very complicated and very precise equipment. The STEM used in [...]
Posted in Industrial Engineering, Materials Engineering | Tagged materials, results | 2 Responses
Authors
- Cherish The Scientist
- Chris Gammell
- EngineerBlogs.org Guest
- Fluxor
- FrauTech
- GEARS
- Miss MSE
- Miss Outlier
- Paul Clarke
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