Beauty in Engineering

I don't want this blog to turn into just a collection of rants, raves, and laments.  Life sucks sometimes and it feels cathartic to write about it, but life is also pretty awesome at times and it wouldn't be fair to only focus on the shitty bits.  So here's my explanation of why design engineering is awesome.

Because engineers don't explicitly study art, literature, history, and the like there is a pervasive stereotype that we are narrow minded and unable to appreciate beauty or think abstractly.  I have found this stereotype most widely postured by those in the humanities and liberal arts fields.  While we may not have as refined an understanding of artwork, or be able to read into every nuance in a piece of literature, we see completely different kinds of beauty and understand the nuances of the systems and phenomena that we all interact with on a daily basis.  I like to think that what we do is simply a different form of art, even though it is often perceived as the opposite of artwork.

Culturally, engineering is typically associated with being a difficult profession with a lucrative career path.  And it is certainly true that there are many people that go into engineering solely in hopes of a large salary.  However, there are even more that choose engineering because it allows you to see the world from a very unique perspective.  Engineering teaches you a lot of difficult math in order to show you a new way of describing the world.  You start looking at everything around you not just at face value but as a product of mathematical modeling, educated design choices and human ingenuity.  Quite literally everything can be viewed this way: buildings, parks, computers, cars, roads, furniture, the list is endless!  Even the pens we write with contain an amazing number of design parameters (ink life, drying time, ergonomics, material safety, mechanical connections, and durability to name a few).  Engineering education and practice fosters an appreciation for the complexity all around us.

If you ever took a pen apart as a kid (or adult) and marveled at how all the pieces fit together so precisely you've experienced the kind of wonder and beauty in design that engineers cherish.

A decade ago, an MP3 player of this size was unthinkable.  Engineering design
makes tomorrow's technology possible.

While engineers deal with a lot of complexity, we are also tasked with simplifying and streamlining these complexities and allowing anyone to interact with them and reap their benefits.  Take an iPod shuffle for example.  While arguments can be made over the value of Apple products versus the cost of their parts, it is hard to argue against the elegance of both their outward and internal design.  While it is not a painting or great work of literature there is beauty in all of the design choices and amazing concepts present in this tiny device. Digital storage, compression algorithms, noise reduction, filtering, D/A conversion, communication protocols, firmware programming, PCB design, power management, battery chemistry, precision machining, ergonomics, aesthetics... the list is long and interdisciplinary.  All these designs and concepts could independently be life long devotions of study.  The beauty for me in the shuffle is seeing all these fields come together in something the size of a quarter to produce a product of such simplicity. 

In my mind engineering is the essence of art and creativity.

Anyone out there in the void have any thoughts?

I'm not jealous, well maybe a little

Facebook isn't good for me.  Facebook isn't good for me, I wish I could get rid of it, but I know I can't.  Facebook is both one of the biggest social links I have to other people and at other times it's the biggest source of demotivational feelings in my life.  Let me explain.

I grew up in a lower middle class family of four.  My dad was a land surveyor and my mom was a musician playing for weddings and other events.  Our summer vacation was a weekend trip camping at the beach, most of our clothes came from Goodwill, we shopped for cheap bulk groceries at the outlet store, we only went out to eat on very special occasions, and our house was the smallest in our neighborhood.  However, until I was about 10 years old, I was mostly oblivious to this, I assumed that these were things that everyone did to save money.  Around the time I turned 10, the market fell out of the live music market and my mom was working substantially less, and we had to penny pinch a lot more.  It began to become more apparent that my family was different from others in our neighborhood.

When I was little I thought everyone earned their money and
that if you ever needed more you could just write a check.

Now, I had a friend growing up who lived up the street, I suppose we'll call him Zach here.  Zach and his family are heirs to a multi-million dollar estate and lived very differently from us.  When I was little I only really noticed this difference in the size of Zach's house, and when they'd be gone on month long vacations.  At the time I assumed it was because his parents were working really hard and earning all of the money themselves.  It was again when I was around 10, and becoming more money conscious, that I started to realize that Zach's parent's didn't have jobs and were living off of inheritance.

Years passed and when I was 18 I was very lucky to get a fairly large scholarship to attend undergrad in Colorado.  The scholarship made it slightly cheaper to go there than school in state (Oregon).  Still, even with scholarships and financial aid, the cost of college is outrageous.  I'm very grateful to my mom helping out with what she could for tuition, but I still had to take out large loans in order to cover the full cost.  While I was in undergrad I worked numerous odd jobs to pay down my loan interest and go out with friends on the rare occasions I had free time.  While earning the money and feeling more independent was nice it came at the cost of a decent amount of time and sanity. 

It's not my fault that you have to be somewhere in 5 minutes
and that we're not as fast as McDonald's.  Calm your tits and
 wait in line like the 20 other people in front of you.

For two and a half years I worked as a line cook and cashier in the food court on weekends.  While it was a good exercise in careful time management, it also showed me the dark side of college student behavior.  I have never felt more disrespected or worthless than when I worked there.  Many students would bark orders, call names, and generally talk down to the food service staff.  I don't think they (especially the incoming freshman) knew that a few of us were students.  Even if none of us were students, no one deserves to be treated that way.  Going to college is a privilege that not everyone is afforded, and anyone working a job like this deserves a certain level of respect from the people that they serve.

Oh damn it, and I just cleaned up all the money
from last week...

Now that I've given a little background on me, let's return to Zach and Facebook.  What prompted this post were some recent pictures that Zach posted of his upcoming wedding.  I haven't talked to Zach much recently buy I have watched what he's been up to on Facebook while I've been in college.  He went to college for a semester before dropping out and living at home again.  In the past four years I've watched as his parents have bought him a house, several cars, paid all of his living expenses, and taken him on all their crazy month long vacations twice a year.  And now that his wedding is coming up the number of lavish Facebook posts has intensified with pictures of the wedding venue, bachelor party craziness, where they're going on their honeymoon, and so forth.

While it would be nice to have all of those things, the only thing that I'm truly jealous of is the security that Zach and his family have.  They never have to worry about budgeting, paying for unexpected expenses, or worrying about anything money related.  They just have a large pile of inherited wealth that they can draw from to do whatever they want with.  It's the contrast between this way of living and my current position of worrying about finding a job after grad. school and paying back all of my student loans that has me feeling jealous.   I don't want a ton of lavish things, I just wish I didn't have to constantly worry.

Ultimately, I need to be happy in what I have now (an intern position that pays well, an awesome boyfriend), what I've accomplished (finishing undergrad), and where I'm headed, (grad school, and then an engineering job that will pay off my loans).  I really need to keep this trajectory in focus and stop comparing myself to other people.  However, it's hard at times to avoid these kinds of jealous comparisons when I'm stuck in a cubicle with nothing to do all day and Facebook as my only window to the outside.

Have you had a similar experience with Facebook, jealousy, and/or college?

My mistake of being a resident assistant

So for some reason I got it into my head freshman year that my biggest goal while in college was to become a resident assistant.  Maybe it was because both of my parents had been RA's or that I really wanted to save some money on room and board and quit my weekend job flipping burgers.  Anyway, I applied for the position for 3 years and finally got accepted my senior year.  In retrospect, I wish I had been rejected again that third and final year because it turned my senior year into quite a nightmare.

While I did genuinely enjoy the core part of the job, interacting with and mentoring freshman students, I came to despise my position for three main reasons:  The administrative staff that I had to work under and answer to, the culture that was fostered among the RA's by said staff, and the nonsensical job expectations that I was expected to uphold.

On my first day of training I met with my supervisor, a Residence Life 'Professional' as he preferred to be called, and I could tell from the very start that we were not going to get along very well.  He had three degrees, 2 BA's in Communications and English and an MA in Student Affairs, all displayed in gaudy frames behind his desk, as if they gave him a lot of prestige. Yet for being a communications major and supposedly knowing so much about students, the dude just seemed to like the sound of his own voice.  The general theme of our weekly meetings was best summed up by the quote from Homer Simpson below.  You would think that

"You take forever to say nothing"

an administrator at a school focused on engineering would understand that engineers don't want to sit and shoot the breeze about absolutely nothing, we have shit to do.        

Beyond this, the entire ResLife 'Professional' Staff really started to get under my skin by half way through the year.  Their only mantra seemed to be 'more programming', as they required us to put on and document 14 distinct programs PER SEMESTER.  Are you fucking kidding me?  I hang out with the students, help them with their homework and roommate conflicts, and take them to school events, but on top of that you want me to try to both put on and sell them on going to 14 different events that focus on themes like 'diversity', 'inclusion', and 'wellness'?  That was not going to happen by any stretch given my workload.  Luckily, when I failed to do most of the programs that they kept hounding on me to do the first semester, all they did was call another meeting with me (surprise?) and tell me that I was going to be on probation for the next semester.  By second semester I figured out how to play the game though.  I went to the grocery store and bought $20 worth of junk food every few weeks, charged it to the school, and made up some silly 'program' that I had 'put on' that needed food.  They never questioned it and I continued doing the same things that I had done the previous semester, but this time without them constantly pestering me.  Bottom line, the people who claim to be 'Residence Life Professionals' with 6+ years of BA's and MA's in cotton candy majors are some of the most annoying and egotistical people I have ever come into contact with.  I made every effort to avoid them when possible. 

The next part of being an RA that drove me nuts was the whole culture surrounding ResLife.  It's kind of creepy.  A good portion of the large all staff meetings were spent on a lot of self congratulatory nonsense, I'm talking a good half hour out of an hour long meeting spent on circle jerking.  Again, this is an engineering school, we have shit to do, why are we wasting our time on this?
 

I'm sure Barney the Dinosaur's numerous

songs on oral hygiene would be ideal

to incorporate into wellness programs for

18 year old students. 

Another creepy aspect of ResLife is that most RA's have a strange relationship with their residents, they treat them like children that are largely incapable of handling themselves.  I understand that I am supposed to be an authority figure, but these are 18 year old young adults, not 12 year old kids.  But that's kind of the whole theme of res life, from the motivational posters, to the door decorations, to the strange protocols for discussing topics with students in the dorms.  They're seen as children that need to be taught lessons in making friends and the importance of brushing their teeth.  I'm sorry, but if students haven't learned these skills by now then they probably shouldn't be in a socially independent college setting.

Finally there are the door decorations and 'informative' bulletin boards ('informative' meaning I looked up some random shit on Wikipedia and Googled a bunch of images to paste on the damn thing to take up space).  While they are an extension of the general 'kindergarten' theme pervasive throughout ResLife and look easy enough to do, they can take up a inane amount of time.  We were required to do one new bulletin board and one new set of tags for all our students every month.  This can easily take 20 to 30 hours if you put any kind of effort into being creative, and a minimum of 10 to 15 hours if you just want to get them done.  I started out the beginning of the year with folded origami decorations that I put a ton of time into, however by the end of the year when I was fed up, tired and thoroughly disillusioned with the nonsense of ResLife, I made the last set of decorations out of Styrofoam with names half-assedly written in glitter glue. 

Yes, of course I have 15+ hours this weekend to make 30 of
these pointless things that no one cares about.  It's not like I
have homework, tests, or any semblance of a social life.

I guess in conclusion I can sum up my RA experience in three words as annoying, stressful, and falsely-advertised.  After writing this, I realize that I really wanted to be an RA because I wanted to be a resourse to freshman and help them succeed academically, and I just wanted to make some new friends.  And despite all the nonsense I've described in this post, I do feel like I was able to do those things to a degree.  I had a blast just hanging out with the students on my floor, and I was able to point them towards some resources when the needed help with different issues.  I only wish that these things could have been a more central part of the experience, rather than all the bullshit peddled by ResLife culture and its 'professional' administrators.

Has anyone else had an experience like this or had an RA that was miserable with the position?





HELLO WORLD!

Good for you Jon

So in my boredom today I decided to start this blog.  So exciting, I know!

Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what the hell this is going to be yet.  Dumping ground for music I find, something to mess with when I can't find anything to do at my summer job, a place to put all those random animated gifs that I'll otherwise forget about, a place to share my giddy excitement about electronics and engineering, a journal of random happenings in my life, my commentary on other blogs/articles/current events, or possibly just a place for random thoughts that I can't find a good way of bringing up in conversation but that I need to get out of my head. Most likely it will a mix of all of theses things.

For now I suppose it will just be a work in progress as I stumble through the blunders of blog layout/setup for the next few weeks.