Enjablog

I had a few people ask me about my management posts a couple weeks ago. Just wanted to clarify that these were in response to emails a friend sent me. This was *not* about my interns this summer (who, for the record, were quite adequate).

After a few days of emails going back and forth, my friend suggested I write a book since she was looking for usable feedback like this, even suggesting the title. I was lazy, so I pasted our emails onto my blog. That’s how books get written these days anyway, right?

So I thought more about why I am so grumpy. And it’s not because she is a *bad* intern, at all — based on effort alone she gets an A. It’s more that I do not enjoy being in charge and responsible 24/7 for her project and my own stuff. It’s the same feeling of annoyance I get when my day is full of commitments that break up the day so I feel like nothing gets done.

So, it’s not her…it’s me. :-P

My career is doomed, isn’t it?

Welcome to my life! ;)

At a certain point you have to make the trade-off between what you, yourself, can accomplish and what you want accomplished as an end-goal.

I can be the smartest person in the world, but I can only do as much as 1 me can do. Even if I could automate processes and be more efficient than 10 average people (I wish!), I can still only do as much as 1 me (by definition).

If I can train 1 person to be half as efficient as me, moving forward, we’re producing at a rate of 1.5 mes. So, the end goal can be set higher than what I’d do myself. And then… welcome to management. I’m worth more training more mes than I am actually doing the work. Still coming to terms with this*. Intellectually, I get it (why CEOs are worth so much). But it’s so not what I want to spend my time doing.

As for your career, no, it isn’t doomed. Well, not necessarily. You’re going to have to deal with this more as a requirement in academia than you will in other careers. So either you tolerate it or you find some way to convince yourself it’s worth the investment. For me, I always have the option of finding a dark corner and going back to my technical work. If you’re headed for research/teaching, you have to convince yourself it’s worth it.

The way I see it, if you want your career in research, you’re definitely going to be in charge of projects 24/7. At least if you want to do anything really interesting. And that means baby-sitting. A lot. But that also means, once you reach a certain level, you’re going to be able to pick the people you want around you to baby-sit the next generation of minions. And then you get to do really cool stuff! :)

*This is all stuff Ian has explained to me on numerous occasions. I just keep forgetting/losing perspective. He definitely has the people skillz in our relationship.

This all started when I emailed a friend to express my regret for not starting a Crazy Log at work years ago. The conversation quickly evolved into one of dealing with people at work… and harnessing the few people skillz we have at our disposal.

I am the worst mentor/intern supervisor ever. :( I am getting annoyed at little problems because we solved them two weeks ago, why aren’t you doing what we decided to do? WRITE THINGS DOWN. And I realize that I am not an expert at using this software either, but if you have the same problems over and over, but I never do, it’s probably not the software. That’s a failure to do each of the steps in the right order. Remember my suggestion to write them down?

I’m also grumpy because I’ve had to adjust my schedule to accommodate her (her carpool gets her here about an hour before I would like to arrive), and coffee only helps so much. And she is super sweet and really excited and interested, but I just. can. not. hide my frustration, and I don’t think I’m being fair to her at all. I owe it to her to be all “hey, this took me awhile to learn, but writing things down when there are lots of steps turns out to save a lot of problems” and try to TEACH her how to work through these things, instead of hiding in my office with my coffee.

Uggghhh. Suggestions?

A few years ago, we had this intern who did a terrible job following instructions and completing a list of tasks. He would always forget to do a step or only incorporate some untrackable subset of the comments given on a deliverable. We resorted to asking my friend’s mom (a special ed teacher) for suggestions.

Recycled for current intern:

1. Tell her to write things down.
2. Remind her to grab her notebook before you talk.
3. Tell her “you should write this down.”
4. Write it down in your notebook when you talk to her to give her cues for things she should be writing down. (And to document what you told her; more for my kind of work environment than yours, since I need documentation for performance reviews if things escalate.)
5. If you’ve already done these things or this is ineffective, follow up face-to-face talks with emails with the instructions listed out.
6. Have her check off each step on the list before asking you questions.

Basically, use every mode of communication available to you and remind her when she asks questions to follow *all* the steps.

I go through this pretty much every year. I started the cycle again 2 months ago! We get these enthusiastic new grads/interns in… I remind myself that they don’t know anything, teach them to carry a notepad around & when to write things down, and baby-sit them. A month (a week?) goes by and I get endlessly frustrated that they can’t do 2 things without asking a question they’ve already asked 10 times!!??

So, it’s normal. Or at least what I consider normal. ;) It’s good to recognize your frustration. Feel free to share with her that you know you’re frustrated, but you really do want her to learn this or whatever would sound sincere from you.

I’ve gotten to the point that I just tell people I’m not naturally a patient person and I’m working on that. If I seem annoyed, it’s not personal and it’s my problem to get over. And they should please look past that and ask me questions anyway because I’ll be even *more* annoyed if I find out later that they could have avoided wasting time doing something wrong.

Plan to set aside half an hour every day, like office hours, to answer questions all at once or walk her through that day’s task for the 20th time. If it’s scheduled into your day, it’s less disruptive and gives her an easy opportunity to re-ask questions that would otherwise bug you when you’re trying to get work done. Do this at her desk/computer so she can walk you through what she thinks she should be doing and you can add in extra steps as needed.

Reward her for doing anything right. Once she’s a little functional, you can pick and choose what’s actually useful for the task at hand. Think behavior modification: reinforcing successive approximations.

P.S. The best thing I did for my engineering career was study psychology. The classes I use more than anything else in my day-to-day life:
- PSYC 3044: Behavior Modification
- PSYC 2044: Psychology of Learning

Went on a recruiting trip this weekend with my company’s recruiter and NewGirl2* (Hokie!) to the Society of Women Engineers Region E conference at UVa. It was my first SWE conference and it was pretty inspiring talking to both the engineers from a generation ahead of me and the new engineers going through school now.

At the banquet, we snagged primo seats at the head table and got to talk to the Dean of Engineering and his wife, President of the Society, and the keynote speaker, Astronaut Kathy Thornton (and Associate Dean for Graduate Programs in Engineering). She gave us a sneak preview of her talk for the evening as “space stuff.” Her speech is apparently one she gives often, but it was entertaining and endlessly interesting, so she seems to have perfected it over the years.

NewGirl2 and I had some fun banter with the Dean of Engineering when he found out we were both Hokies, but everyone was a good sport about it, especially since our company was a sponsor and we were recruiting their engineers. We traded stories with his wife who grew up in NOVA and used to teach high school classes on shorthand and typing.

It was a fun time and we got to try out a couple restaurants in downtown Charlottesville, which I hadn’t done before. Had dinner at Basil on Friday night and a snack at Marco & Luca dumpling shop (NewGirl2 had never had dumplings before!). The Saturday night banquet was super fancy at the Farmington Country Club. Got home late last night just in time to miss the dusting of snow that passed over the area.

*Not actually the second new girl in the company since the original NewGirl, but the only one I’ve had reason to mention.

This has been kicking around in my draft folder for a while, so figured I should just go ahead and post it. It’s a cake I made for my tech society’s BBQ this summer.

I lost some of the border to the summer heat. Completely forgot to take a picture before we left and it was a little melty by the time we got to our destination. Misjudged my font size when I started out too and ended up having to cut out “the” to make it fit. Still tasted good though! :)

And then the birthday cake for Alison’s birthday that night:

I was really pleased with how this cake turned out and even got a chance to use some of my decorating combs on it (which were way more challenging than I expected).

A few people have asked me about this quote since Friday night’s debate, so I thought I’d post it up.

“We tried to build a little ship called the Littoral Combat Ship that was supposed to cost $140 million, ended up costing $400 million, and we still haven’t done it.”

Got that out of a transcript. I didn’t catch the whole quote at the time because I was surprised by the number he cited. But, uhm, I thought we kind of did build that little ship.

So… after clocking 10 hours at work today, I had a group meeting for class. And now I have about an hour of homework to finish up and review other people’s slides, along with emails tasking me with about another 4 hours of work that I’m expected to get done by tomorrow morning.

Seriously? When did I become an adult? I’m still surprised by this. Still.

Things still on to do list:
- finish laundry
- empty dishwasher (I have discovered that the “clean dishes” light turns off after a month. Yes, I’m that bad.)
- finish homework
- email group
- schedule time to work on my part of design to send to classmate
- get enough work done so I don’t go crazy tomorrow morning
- pick up prescription that I called to refill 3 days ago
- go to sleep
- stop blogging.

Some time next week, my weight will officially be recorded in history in a government document. Truly, I have made it in life.

1) If you visit, even in the dead of summer, bring a jacket. It’s in the 60s today.

2) There are 3 things to do around here: 1. Tuesday night karaoke. 2. Thursday night (tonight!) wing night. 3. Saturday night karaoke.

3) Butter goes on everything. Hamburgers, sandwiches, bbq, salad… everything.

4) There are plenty of vegetables and, well, I won’t say “healthy,” but non-fried food options around here. Just not at the places Boss Jr took me to last week.

5) There are no Packers fans here. They’re all Favre fans. And now they’re Jets fans.

I received my most exciting e-card ever today: exciting e-card.

This was met with confusion because I didn’t realize I had done anything that would merit congratulating. And then. I saw the text.

I rushed over to the Virginia Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation website and typed in my name.

I passed!!!

And TLD passed!!!

Zina found out from TLD. The other person in our study group, TattooGirl, had to live in another state. So now we’re waiting on Maryland. And our fourth study buddy is taking the exam next spring.

I am so unbelievably thrilled. And relieved. Really relieved that I don’t have to study for this again.

WOOOOOO!!!!!

There’s a revolving door leading into my building at work. I don’t really know why, but I love revolving doors. Some days I just like to rush through and push it as hard as I can. And other days, I try to see how little I can move the door and still get through. Today was one of those days.

I got to the door and was just able to squeeze past one of the partitions into a mostly enclosed section. I then pushed softly to just get the door moving and stepped out, turning to see where the door would stop. Less than 90 degrees. I would estimate close to 60. This way, I’m conserving energy by both being lazy and minimizing heat transfer in and out of the building.

Wow, I just sat down to write about my last few days and I completely blanked on the last thing I wrote about.

So.

I’m back from Texas. I was there for an inclining experiment for a sludge vessel. And yeah… a sludge vessel is pretty much what it sounds like. It was a new ship though, so not gross yet. It was unbearably hot and humid on Thursday and there were predictions of thunderstorms on Friday, so we moved our flights back from Saturday morning to the evening just in case the inclining ran over.

And then it was gorgeous on Friday. It was a little overcast in the morning, but the afternoon was 70s and clear. We finished up around 9pm and I went back to my hotel room to wash off the layer of grime I had collected throughout the day. It was an educational trip. I did my first tank sounding and got to climb in, out, and around tanks and machinery. I have decided that when I finally get around to sorting my clothes for donations, I need to start a shipyard wardrobe.

Got back Saturday night and just crashed. Sunday was mostly dedicated to the Post Hunt. I got my newspaper this week! So, I was able to look through the magazine and prepare before going out to my car and finding my battery dead. Again.

Ian came over for breakfast though, so he was nice enough to drop me off at the metro so I wouldn’t miss out on all the fun. It was crazy over there and I can’t believe people actually figured out the final puzzle. Our group was standing around with half our clues wrong and just dialing phone numbers from the magazine.

Headed home after the excitement concluded and Ian drove me to Target to get posterboard for the ASNE L&R student poster contest that I entered. Which was today, btw. I came home to work on it and promptly fell asleep on the couch with Dellilah on my lap. Oops…

Woke up to my parents calling on their way back from a wedding. They offered to trade cars with me later in the evening so I could still go to Annapolis today for the symposium. Woo!

Then… I procrastinated for most of the evening and ended up uploading a bunch of pictures to CVS for them to print out for me to use on the poster. Except the earliest I could pick the pictures up was 11am. So, I picked a CVS in Annapolis and set about laying out the rest of the poster.

It’s been years since I last needed to make a poster. Maybe high school… possibly earlier than that. Apparently, at some point posters got awesome and I missed the memo. I printed out my title and text; cut out colored paper for matting; paired off photos with text; and pasted/taped everything together.

There were 4 posters there today. One was printed on plotter paper, laminated, and tacked to a foam board. Another was professionally printed and mounted on a foam board cut to size. The third was done on a tri-fold board in the same style as mine, but with way more charts and equations… what with all of them being about technical papers.

The judges were really nice about it, even though when I walked in it was clear that the other people had put way more effort into it than I did. And mine looked like I had made it that morning… you know, because I had. The judges went around talking with each student for 20-30 minutes. One of the judges was even a volunteer at the event I made my poster about, so she had some good questions. She didn’t get to go around and see all the different games that were going on either, so she particularly enjoyed my pictures. Then they spent over half an hour deliberating and even asked the coordinator if they could give me an outreach award or something.

I did win a consolation ASNE membership for a year though. I guess they didn’t want me to be the only one without a prize. So, that was exciting. :)

On the way home I saw a big rig tipped over and facing the wrong direction, which looked to be a moving truck. There was a second truck next to it that they were moving all the stuff to.

So tired. Driving to VA Beach tomorrow night for training on Wednesday. Baltimore on Thursday.

When do I get a nap?

My boots arrived!! They are surprisingly comfortable and smidge big, but that means I get to wear thick, comfy socks with them. So, it all worked out. Very relieved.

So, I’ve been telling this story at work lately because people wanted to know what the big deal was with my away message all week. When I told Boss Jr at our department meeting, I said that Target only had men’s boots. And I could see him getting ready to ask why I didn’t just buy men’s boots. So I cut him off to save him the embarrassment of asking why a person with little kid feet didn’t just wear grown up shoes. Because, yeah… at this point in my life, now I’m going to concern myself with fashion and aesthetics. That’s why I didn’t buy them. I know, I’m so confusing.

I was wearing my boots around the apartment last night to get used to them and break them in a little. And I know this is obvious, but they are heavy. It’s almost a 5% increase to my weight. I’m like a walking bobo doll. Very stable though.

Alright… going back to reading. Flight takes off in an hour.

QOTD: “Are they pink? Hello Kitty steel toed boots.” Now there’s a demographic I’d like to see…

So, I found out last week that I’m going to a shipyard this week for work. This means steel toed boots. You’d think that working in my industry for 5 years now, I would already have a pair for the occasional trips I take to shipyards. But you’d also be wrong.

There was only one time I was really supposed to have steel toed boots and that was a ship check I went on 3 years ago. I wore regular boots and no one really cared. There wasn’t much construction going on anyway… not that they were ever working when I walked by either. All the other times, I should have had them, but I was going when everything was cleaned up for civilian walk-throughs, so it wasn’t a big deal.

Anyway, I figured since I would need them occasionally anyway, I should just get a pair and be done with. Oh, how I wish I had gone to the trouble of getting them 3 years ago.

I asked around where other people (work, friends, family…) had gotten theirs. Target, Walmart, etc. All common places that sell shoes. Ok, no big deal, right? Oh wait… They only sell men’s shoes? Right… Because men work in construction sites and need boots. Women? They can just stand in the kitchen making pie. You don’t even need shoes for that.

So, I spent part of my afternoon looking around stores and finding nothing. I’m a women’s size 6.5-7, which according to the size chart at Target looked like I was a boys size 6. Turns out boys don’t need steel toe boots either. Go figure.

I came home and looked online to see where I could find shoes and my first hit was:
Where to buy Women’s steel toed boots before tomorrow??

Unfortunately for me, that was for Seattle. But they gave me some good leads. And then I ended up ordering from Zappos anyway, so I probably didn’t need that site. Even ordering from them, I had some trouble. The first pair I tried to order had sold out of my size and another pair didn’t come in my size. It’s not like I have an abnormal size foot for a woman!

Finally I found a pair I liked and ordered them. And then realized that I didn’t do 1-day shipping. Having those shoes show up in a week isn’t going to do me any good. I called Zappos’s 24/7 customer service line and explained what I had done and asked if it would be possible to change the shipping on it. I assumed it wouldn’t be a big deal since it’s Sunday and there’s no way it would’ve shipped out that quickly. The lady on the phone was so nice and said she would fix that right away and just as a thank you for calling them, she would change it to next-day shipping for me at no extra charge! So, just for messing up, I get free shipping. Woo!

We’ll see how this works out. But I’m expecting the boots to show up on Tuesday and I fly out Wednesday morning. *Crossing fingers.*

The PE exam only permits test-takers to choose from 5 different calculators. I finally broke down and looked into the different options yesterday because I didn’t want to study anymore. And I figured it was a good investment of time, since I want to familiarize myself with the calculator while I’m doing practice problems to be most efficient in my studies.

The decision was a difficult one.

The HP-35 was the world’s first scientific pocket calculator. It was discontinued well before I was born and require battery packs, which are also no longer sold. *Awesome.*

The HP-33 was a little better, but at twice the price of the other calculators, didn’t seem worth it. Reviews included complaints about battery life and difficulty seeing the decimal point. Pros were comparable to the other options.

The TI-36X had reviews from people saying they thought it was great, but with minor complaints about calculation speed and durability.

The Casio FX-115

• A Good Year movie download

had a few versions that I couldn’t distinguish between. It fared well in durability, battery life, and even had a review from someone who was pleased with its performance on the PE. Only real complaint was that the cursor was slow and you have to type slowly or it will miss keystrokes. Fake complaints: instructions were printed with a small font and operator error (couldn’t get the answer in decimal form instead of fraction).

Finally, the TI-30X

buy La tumba de la isla maldita got some mixed reviews. There were plenty of people raving about its awesomeness and told stories of how it got them through all of middle- and high school math. It’s durable and withstood coffee spills, etc. Complaints included one person who used it for the PE didn’t like the buttons, and 2 others who thought it was confusing and not user-friendly.

It was kind of a toss-up between the last two. But then there was the tie-breaker:

…except for the part where they don’t actually sell it. Office Depot doesn’t carry it anymore and Target said that the closest one was at their Forestville location. Too far.