Arlen Ward dot com

Spinal Tap Engineering.

Today’s XKCD made me laugh out loud. Some problems are marketing and sales problems, not engineering problems.

Spinal Tap Engineering (Click to see original)

Units of measure are sooooo unnecessary.

The first rule of street-fighting mathematics is…

The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club

Math is always portrayed as exacting and calculating, but there is a great need for those that deal with numbers on a regular basis to also have a sense for approximate answers. Throughout engineering school it is often referred to as “back of the envelope” calculation. Quick and dirty approximation that gives a sense of the exact answer.

A colleague pointed me to a class called “Street-Fighting Mathematics” over on the MIT Open Course Ware site. MIT OCW is a site with lecture notes, readings, exams and videos from quite a few classes. Now you have no excuse for sitting around doing nothing on a Friday night! Street-fighting Mathematics is taught by Sanjoy Mahajan, and it looks pretty well put together.

The course description reads:

This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis. Applications include mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations. (No epsilons or deltas are harmed by taking this course.)

Seems to be the thing everybody should review every once in a while. Here is your first assignment, now get to work!

I see that a book based on the Last Lecture of Randy Pausch was released a while ago.

While it something that I would not mind reading some day, I really only mention it so that I can link to the YouTube video of the lecture Pausch gave for the Last Lecture “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. Watch the whole thing, you will be a better person for it. The insights and clarity are not often available like this.

Well, I have been remiss in updating the blog recently, though I have lots of good reasons. Actually they all boil down to one: I have been too busy to post.

What have I been up to? Here is the summary in five lines:

1. Working like mad to finish my last semester of classes (only three weeks to go!).
2. Installed new optical tables and workbenches in the lab (I’ll do a virtual tour one of these days).
3. Took the Professional Engineering exam at the end of October (I think I passed, but will know for sure in late December).
4. Working out at Emerfit doing the CrossFit thing (the longest I have ever stuck to a workout plan, including basic training!).
5. Any remaining seconds in the day were filled with family stuff, and sometimes sleep.

Just to keep you entertained until I have more time to post interesting things, I point you to The Periodic Table of Videos, put together by the University of Nottingham. Check it out, if only for the great hairdo of academia (you’ll know it when you see it).

For example, here is the Cesium video:

There are lots of great videos on their site.

Last week, in addition to being introduced to the Miracle of Science Bar and Grill*, I had the opportunity to attend the professional short course from MIT’s Edgerton Center, High-Speed Imaging for Motion Analysis: Systems and Techniques.

Below are a few of the images captured during the course, during the bullet lab. It consisted of taking still images with a 500 nanosecond strobe of (what else?) .22 bullets going through things. These were taken in a dark room with the camera shutter open, and a microphone trigger for the strobe. I re-hosted these and others in the general photography section of this site and in addition you can find them on the Edgerton Center Site, along with others from previous years.

Read more »

As mentioned in the Cliff’s notes version regarding April, I spent a few days in Munich last month. It was part of the 10th International Conference on Hyperthermic Oncology. The trip was quick (yay for direct flights), and unfortunately the family didn’t get to join me. I did get to present a poster of one of the measurement tools we are using in my dissertation research, so that was a plus.

The conference venue was a hospital that was located about six or seven kilometers from the hotel, so I quickly learned the layout of the subway system in order to get back and forth each day. The hotel was close to the center of town, so there was a chance to see the Rathaus and wander around downtown each night.

Read more »

Hmmm. It sure has been a while since I have posted! I seem to be missing the whole month of April. Sorry about that!

Things have been crazy, but I am still alive. So here’s the cliff notes version of April:

• School
• Work
• I helped build a train track around the boy’s room.
• School
• Work
• I went to Munich for a Hyperthermia Conference
• School
• Work
• I gave a couple of presentations on protiens including measuring denaturing energy with an atomic force microscope and computational methods for simulating folding.
• School
• Work
• School
• Work

More updates in the near future.

This is the second post in a series on getting your first engineering job, you can find part one here.

I wanted to cover a couple of things related to that first job; things that I learned along the way, both when I was looking for work and in the last couple years looking at resumes.

There are lots of places on the internet to get advice on all aspects of the job search, from resumes, to cover letters, to interviews, and follow up. The things mentioned here are what I noticed, and more specific to job searches that I have experienced rather than the basics covered elsewhere.

For job openings you could scour the classifieds (or the latest equivalent, craigslist), but online job searches seem pretty efficient. Networking is also very productive, people that belong to the professional organizations where you are a student member, some of the “non-traditional” students that have jobs, previous places where you worked as an intern (and enjoyed it).

For the resume preparation, I have a few tips that I don’t often see in other resume writing articles. But first there is something I want to emphasize, that is oft repeated elsewhere: The purpose of the resume isn’t to get you a job. The purpose of the resume is to get you an interview. So for resumes, here’s the advice I have:

• Customize it: For every job you apply for or every time you forward your resume, you need to tailor it to the job.
• Layout for 5 seconds: With a stack of resumes to go through, the first screening pass ignores the header info, and scans down the left side for important things. If you don’t make the 5 second cut, it doesn’t matter if you are the perfect candidate.
• Include unique or applicable classes: If you have an mechanical engineering degree, you shouldn’t take up space listing Thermodynamics or Dynamics as a class you took. Put the electives that demonstrate your training or classes that will be a direct benefit to the job you are applying for.
• Include software packages: Often the key attributes for filling an entry level position includes familiarity with a specific software package, so list those that you are familiar with. “I need someone that knows LabView” or “If they knew MATLAB, that would be nice!” are phrases often heard, just subsitute software applicable to the job.

There is a relatively new aspect to resume submittal that I don’t see covered very often. When applying to some of the larger companies around, it is often necessary to submit your information through their website. If they don’t have a way to attach a file like a word document or a pdf, then you are going to have to submit it through the text box. The problem? Well the text box strips out the formatting. Just try taking that nicely formatted Microsoft Word resume (the one that you have slaved over for hours if not days) and cutting and pasting it into the text box. It isn’t exactly the clean, easy to read presentation that you need to get past the initial screening process.

So what can you do about this? Well the answer is another version of your resume. One that you write in a text editor without tabs, bullets, or other formatting. A plain text editor like Notepad in Windows or TextEdit in OS X.

One other thing related to electronic submissions. Searchable keywords are being included as a part of the resume submittal process. Now, in and of itself this isn’t a bad thing. Unless the search that is used to find candidates that match particular requirements isn’t very sophisticated. Consider the wording. If you have experience in solid modeling, and used PTC’s Pro/Engineer software, you might want to use that as a keyword. So you add “Pro/Engineer”. But the engineering manager that is looking for a new hire was in a hurry when they wrote the job description and the human resources person doesn’t know anything about solid modeling. So they searched the term “ProE”, or “ProEngineer”, or “Pro/E”. Actually the last one might bring up a hit, since it is a subset of “Pro/Engineer”. So if there are options for the way a skill will be searched, try to include as many of these as possible in your keyword list.

With all of the ways that your information can get lost, never looked at, or just ignored, it becomes more important than ever to get around the HR hurdle and get your resume in front of those managers that are looking for someone like you. This might be unwelcome news for the introverts in engineering, but the networking is very important.

I think there will be one final installment to this series, with a few tips and observations about the interview.

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.

Every once in a while, an e-mail comes through that reminds me that I work in a strange place.

_________________________________________________________________________________
From: LAB MANAGER
Sent: Yesterday
To: EVERYONE THAT WORKS WITH TISSUE

Subject: Missing Liver

If anyone is missing a liver, it’s in the RF Ablation lab with Tony’s name on it.