Engineering Science - Introduction

Introducing... You

2006-11-10T13:45:00Z

Peter and I have a lot of interesting topic ideas for the months ahead. But we want to make sure that we write about things that you are interested in.

Leave us a comment, introduce yourself, and tell us what aspects of science and engineering careers and training do you want to discuss!

Introducing Peter

2006-11-09T19:17:00Z

Hello!

Like Geoff, I embarked on my PhD when all around me (including my father - a Ph.D. Geoscientist with the Smithsonian) were telling me I could expect a wave of academic retirements to open up numerous employment opportunities for me when I graduated.

But as I approached the last year of my Ph.D. not only did I hear about a huge mismatch between hopes and realities, but I myself was no longer sure that the academic pathway was the right one for me. While I had a generally successful graduate school experience, and remain good friends with my Ph.D. advisor to this day, I admit that I was a "problem" graduate student. I got involved in all sorts of extra-curricular things and even did some extramural research that didn't go over very well with my department. It seemed that I lacked that obsessive-compulsive disorder that was the hallmark of a good academic!

After meeting with a wonderful career counselor at my university (Dr. Al Levin), I realized that the issues I was struggling with were common throughout graduate school:

What are my career options at this point?
How can I find a fulfilling career that I will love?
Did I waste my time doing a PhD?

Al and I decided we would set up a career development workshop for Ph.D.s at the Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December, 1993. Though poorly advertised and barely acknowledged by AGU, the workshop attracted a throng: graduate students and post-docs were sitting in the aisles and standing out in the hallway. We had clearly hit a nerve.

Since that workshop I went on to study the career development process as it specifically applied to early career scientists. I kept getting invited to give the workshop and, in 1996, put together a book on the subject: To Boldly Go: A Practical Career Guide for Scientists. That book, published by AGU (and never publicized beyond the geosciences) found its way out to the broader community of young scientists and engineers and helped provide many thousands of young scientists with a practical and hopeful strategy to take control of their tattered careers. I followed up that first book with a 2nd edition: Put Your Science to Work in 2000.

I also give career development workshops at major research universities and national labs around the country. I may have met you at one of these: over 8,000 graduate students and post-docs have attended my workshops over the past 13 years.

I have a "real job" now, and a family and plenty of things that keep me busy, so you might ask: why am I spending time on this??? The answer is simple: I believe that young scientists and engineers have the capacity to change the world. I love helping people at a very critical moment in their lives, when some good advice can have the biggest impact. The system of graduate education in the sciences has some profound problems, and these problems are NEVER going to work themselves out on their own. Rather than beat my head against that wall, I like to work with the people who have the most at stake: young scientists and engineers themselves. Helping you to understand the true range of your opportunities and encourage you to make the best contribution you can is probably a greater service I can do than any scientific research I might have done had I stayed at the bench. Along that line, you might also want to check out my monthly column on ScienceCareers.org entitled Opportunities Like Geoff, I am looking forward to a stimulating conversation and some good ideas to come.

Introducing Geoff

2006-11-09T18:24:00Z

Hi. Pleased to meet you. I’m Geoff Davis.

People often ask me why I’m so interested in science and engineering education issues. Why worry about all this stuff when I could be doing math or writing code or playing outside?

An anecdote might shed some light:

I started grad school in 1989. I had a lot of company: in the late 80’s, the NSF kicked off a push to prevent a huge shortfall of scientists and engineers that they predicted would soon arise. I got my PhD in 1994, and believe me, there was no such shortfall. I was one of the lucky ones – I landed a postdoc – but the sense of collective despair as people found no jobs after sending out literally hundreds of applications is hard to forget.

Early in my postdoc career, I somehow got the idea that my department’s undergraduate math curriculum needed some serious revamping (ah, youth!). To bolster my claim, I crunched all the enrollment numbers for the previous 10 years and put together an elaborate series of charts documenting major declines in pure math classes but steady growth in the applied classes. I wrote a lengthy manifesto about what a new applied math curriculum should look like and all the benefits it would bring to the department. The chair and vice chair listened politely to a presentation I gave on the subject, then did what any sensible administrators would do: patted me on the head and ignored me.

About 6 months later the vice-chair came into my office holding a copy of my manifesto. They had been handing out copies at a conference he had attended across the country. Apparently one of the organizers had downloaded it from my home page and thought it worth disseminating. I was stunned by the potential power of the web. And was hooked immediately. phds.org was born shortly afterwards.

Until now, phds.org has been largely a showcase for the work of others. The communication has been mostly one-way, as well – the site gets a lot of traffic, but I hear from very few of you. I’m looking forward to an exchange of ideas in the months ahead.

About the Comments

2006-11-09T14:16:00Z

When you comment on one of our posts (and we hope you will!), you will probably notice a few differences from other blogs. Engineering Science uses an off-the-shelf blogging system (hats off to the Mephisto team), but, being a compulsive software guy, I have souped it up a bit.

Peter and I want Engineering Science to be more of a discussion than a place for us to pontificate. The software enhancements I’ve made are designed to foster good discussions.

We make house calls. You can sign up to get an email when we post new material on the blog. It’s quick and relatively painless – click on the "Email alerts" link in the dark blue bar at the top of the page. And don’t worry – it’s easy to unsubscribe, too.
Talk amongst yourselves. Most blogs have a flat comment structure. You can comment on the article, but it’s hard to interact with your fellow commenters. We’ve changed that – our comment section is more like a threaded discussion forum. You can comment on the article or on other comments. And, to keep the discussion going, you can elect to receive an email when people reply to one of your comments (again, it’s easy to turn this off).
Maximum signal, minimum noise. Large group discussions inevitably generate a mix of good and bad comments. We don’t want to read inappropriate/off-topic/spam comments any more than you do, so we have put in place several mechanisms to highlight good comments and weed out bad ones.

Spam we are taking care of using a sophisticated, automated anti-spam filter. Separating the wheat from the chaff is a more interesting problem. It’s tough to automate, and we don’t want to have to approve all comments by hand (after all, we have real jobs!). Our solution takes a page from digg.com

When a discussion starts, you will see a little green and red +1 / -1 link above each comment. These links let you give feedback on comments. If you like a comment, give it a point (+1); if you don’t, give a negative point (-1). A selector at the top of the comments lets you hide comments whose total score falls below a threshold you specify.

So take a minute and try it out. Leave us a comment. Say hello. We look forward to some good discussions with you!

What's with the name "Engineering Science"?

2006-11-09T14:05:00Z

Peter and I (and hopefully you) share a belief that the current manner in which new scientists and engineers are trained leaves room for improvement. But what, exactly, needs to be done? There is no shortage of ideas for ways to “fix” things.

Over the past few years, I have had the privilege of working with a group of economists who study the labor market for scientists and engineers. One of the things I have enjoyed the most about working with economists (I’m a mathematician by training) is their approach. They study the S&E labor market the same way an astrophysicist might a newly discovered comet: here is what it is made of, here is how its trajectory behaves when it is perturbed in various ways, and so on. The more they understand the dynamics of the market, the better they can predict what kinds effects changes might have.

When we apply the scientific method to science, we transform the task of improving the system from an exercise in windmill-tilting to an engineering problem. How can we engineer science so that we produce the best possible researchers? (Or, for you engineers, how can we apply science to engineering to further the same goal?) Engineering Science is about answering these questions.

In the beginning...

2006-11-09T05:05:00Z

Hello everyone, welcome to Engineering Science. 14 years ago, a young scientists named Kevin Aylesworth started a listserve called the Young Scientist’s Network to open up a dialog among young scientists concerned about the science job market. Kevin was frustrated and angry with a system of PhD production that seemed not only to be totally decoupled with the demand for PhD scientists and engineers but also promulgated a (convenient) idea that there was a looming wave of retirements that would pave the way for new employment opportunities for young scientists. Kevin’s voice was joined by thousands of others and a grassroots internet-based movement among young scientists began. The bi-weekly communications allowed thousands of graduate students, post-docs and adjunct faculty – the sherpas of the scientific system – to not only voice their own frustrations but to directly challenge the scientific establishment. Out of this movement came a new recognition on the part of funding agencies and universities of the need for better management of the process of graduate education (and, later, the post-doc experience) and the need to align science funding, and science education with the demands for technical workers in the new economy.

Fast forward to today. Some of the changes promoted by young scientists back then have become established in the ivy-encrusted halls of academia. There is an acknowledgment on the part of many professors that most of their graduate students will not end up in jobs like theirs. There is an increased awareness of non-traditional career pathways for PhDs. Post-docs, once a shadowy and ill-defined employment status at most institutions, are now a formally recognized employment category – and many institutions have formalized training, mentorship and career development for them. Funding agencies such as the NSF have set up new programs to support scientists at the early stages of their careers.

This is all good stuff, and, considering how slow academia is to change, quite remarkable. But the Young Scientist’s Network has long since ceased operation, and many of the issues that young scientists and engineers were concerned about back then remain today. And, with the rising politicization of science itself (think: Global Warming, Stem Cell Research, Teaching Evolution) scientists and engineers of all ages are confronted with policy decisions made in their state legislatures and on Capitol Hill that have a direct and immediate effect on their lives and their livelihoods.

As you can see from our bios, Geoff and I have long ago graduated from being “young” scientists. But we have remained active in this area and, along with a number of remarkable thinkers, economists and policy wonks, we have continued to explore these issues and, occasionally, stir up “trouble”. With support from the Sloan Foundation we are at it again with “Engineering Science”

So, tune in, turn on and speak up – we’re going live NOW.