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A former professor of mine has asked me to give a talk to his senior design class about how to get a job. This has got me thinking lately: how do you get that first job after graduation?

The first lesson for any engineer should be “any conclusions made from a single datum point should be highly suspect”. Since this whole series is based on just my experience, you should view it more as an opinion than gospel. My experience is around Mechanical Engineering training, and getting a job working in medical devices, but it might work with some translation for other degree programs and industries.

We’ll start from the beginning. You have to decide what interests you; after all we are talking about your career here. Something about mechanical engineering drew you to the degree program, so there must be appeal in some aspect of the industry. When I started in school, I was going to work in aerospace. Rockets, satellites, or whatever, it didn’t matter. I wanted to work in that industry, and that’s what drew me to an ME program. Many people I know started in ME because of their interest in cars.

But you have learned more about the various industries as you have progressed through school. Maybe there are areas you had never considered before. But now that you know more about the discipline, it is worth spending some time re-examining your career goals.

• What topics in class have you enjoyed? Note that that is topics not professor personality.
• Student memberships in the professional associations come with a magazine and often a second that is targeted at students. These will give a cross-section of possibilities too.
• People. Networking is a fact of life, you might as well get used to talking to them now. Engineering contacts at companies are orders of magnitude more useful than HR contacts.
• Research areas for your professors are involved in are normally targeted at specific industries. You don’t need to become an expert, just know what’s out there.
• Read. Search the internet. Seek out the possibilities.

There are lots of aspects to mechanical engineering (just look at the different divisions within ASME), and there are jobs in all of them. That is just within one professional organization, there are dozens more that work with engineers.

Once you have an idea of what you want to do, take steps to tailor your education in that direction. Electives, internships, co-ops, student organizations, senior projects, and volunteer work are all opportunities to steer your career. The idea is to make it clear from your entire resume that you are headed toward a job in a particular area, not just the two-line objective at the top.

Now, if you think this takes time, you are right. If you think this should be considered long before the first resume goes out, you are right. If you are in your last semester and just now thinking about a job, is everything hopeless? No, I don’t think so, but it sure would make it easier if you start early.

In the next post, we’ll get into cover letters, resumes, and why keywords are your friends.

It looks like that future we have heard about has arrived. At the Greener Gadgets Conference in New York, there was a Bluetooth enabled touch screen that is designed to be inserted between the skin and the muscle. That’s right, an animated and interactive tattoo. But that is not the awesome part.

The basis of the 2×4-inch “Digital Tattoo Interface” is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity. After blood flows in from the artery to the fuel cell, it flows out again through the vein.

It runs off energy from your blood. How cool is that.

Turns out that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Medtronic today, saying that a company that manufactures an FDA approved device can not be sued under state laws if that device causes injury.

The Supreme Court upheld the lower federal courts on Wednesday, with Justice Antonin Scalia writing for the majority that Medtronic and other manufacturers were protected under the Medical Device Amendments of 1976, which in its section on pre-emption bars states from imposing on medical devices “any requirement which is different from, or in addition to, any requirement applicable under this chapter.”

Interesting. It kind of ups the pressure on the FDA during the approval process, doesn’t it?

There is a distinct lack of faith in juries to understand the risk vs. reward thing too.

“It may thus approve devices that present great risks if they nonetheless offer great benefits in light of available alternatives,” Justice Scalia wrote, noting that the F.D.A. approved a ventricular assist device for children with failing hearts “even though the survival rate of children using the device was less than 50 percent.”

For those with clear skies tomorrow night, there will be a total lunar eclipse at 8:01 MST. It should last about 50 minutes or so, and will be visible in North and South America, Europe and Africa. The moon won’t disappear, but will turn red in color due to the light coming off the Earth’s atmosphere. Check it out if you can, next one is December 2010!

I saw an interview with Cookie Monster from NPR on one of their blog sites. Other than insight into Cookie’s sordid tales of compulsive eating and the trials of stardom (no, not really), I was interested in the reference to the modified questionaire the interviewer used. It turns out to be the “Proust Questionnaire”, now often used as a personality questionnaire. So I thought I would run though it here just for fun.

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The National Academy of Engineering has listed the grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. You can even go to their web site and vote for which you think is the most important challenge to meet in the next 100 92 years

They listed challenges in four areas: sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living.

• In the area of sustainability, they identified challenges in environmentally friendly power, nuclear fusion, capturing carbon dioxide, countermeasures for nitrogen cycle problems, and providing acess to clean water.
• For the area of health, “reverse-engineering” the brain, computer catalogs of health information, and developing new medicines.
• The section on vulnerability covers a counter to the nuclear threat, sustaining the aging infrastructure of cities and services, and could potentially include the improved medicine challenge mentioned earlier.
• For the joy of living area, challenges in personalized learning, improved virtual reality, securing cyberspace, and my personal favorite, engineering the tools used for future scientific discovery.

While I have to agree that these are all noble pursuits, and these would really solve some of the major problems we currently face, I really feel like it is a bit short sighted. If you look at the list of the greatest engineering achivements of the 20th century, I really doubt anyone would have even hit half that list when making predictions in 1908. I would say we are in for things in this century that are barely on the radar for anyone at this point.

As a professed data presentation nerd, I have always liked the postings over at Strange Maps.

Recently there was a post with a map of the United States, shaded by leading church body in each county.. This one caught my eye, just with the clustered groups of various denominations. No conclusion, I just thought it was interesting.

It seems appropriate to wish my vast readership a happy Valentine’s day by linking to a couple of guys that have put together some science-based cards, and both amuse me to no end. Over at Ironic Sans David has a set that hits the big names like Darwin, Sagan, and Newton (and others!). I was going to go with the Newton card, but then I was reading the versions that came from the Jacks of Science blog. Chris’ set is more topic based, but my favorite is his Einstien card:

So Happy Valentine’s Day everybody!

If I had an observatory at my house, I would be out there all the time. If I had big telescopes at my house, you would have to pry me away with a crowbar. People would be sick of hearing me talk about the stars and planets, and they would run and hide every time I got out the pictures.

But alas, it is not so for everyone.

As reported in the Independent, Pope Benedict XVI is moving the observatory off the grounds of his summer residence.

Science is to make way for diplomacy at the Pope’s summer residence, with the dismantling of the astronomical observatory that has been part of Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, for more than 75 years. The Pope needs more room to receive diplomats so the telescopes have to go.

Moving it to make more room to receive diplomats? I think the stars would be more interesting, but nobody died and made me Pope.

This is a nod to J. Willard Gibbs, who happens to have a birthday today. I’d get him a cake, but he’s been dead for 105 years.

Not only was he awarded the first Ph.D. in Engineering in the United States, but he also is the Gibbs in Gibbs Free Energy, G, a key concept used in the work for my dissertation.

Gibbs described it as the “available energy”, the amount of energy free to do work given the conditions internal energy, U, pressure, p, volume, V, temperature, T, and entropy, S:

The greatest amount of mechanical work which can be obtained from a given quantity of a certain substance in a given initial state, without increasing its total volume or allowing heat to pass to or from external bodies, except such as at the close of the processes are left in their initial condition.

Looking at the change in Free Energy, you can determine if the change in the system is going to be spontaneous (ΔG<0) or not (ΔG>0).

And tomorrow is Darwin’s birthday!