heres the video blog

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXbs3CcBFTg

Ethics

Ethics are something that most people believe in and most people don’t live out very well.  When it comes to clear cut things like drugs, stealing, murder, and other obviously wrong things, the vast majority of society fully respects these laws and don’t break them.  But when it comes to things like speeding or cheating or taking illegal shortcuts, etc, many people do not respect the law and find it easy to avoid.  I for one thought that I could speed and not get caught and for the two years after I got my license this was true.  But then everything went wrong and in four short months, I found myself in two accidents, with two tickets, on court supervision, and a huge bill to pay.  I have to say that I was lucky.  I learned my lesson without anyone getting hurt which looking back on my wild driving habits is a miracle.  But it shouldn’t have taken getting caught to change my habits.  I should have known all along that reckless driving is not acceptable just as many other habits that break the law are not.

Cheating is one of these things that is absolutely unacceptable.  Whether it is in high school, taking the ACT, in college, or in the workplace, cheating is unethical and will eventually have consequences.  One thing many people don’t realize is that even if they say they never get caught, they are only hurting themselves more in the long run.  In fact it would be much better if high school teachers cracked down and gave zero’s for cheating on tests to teach kids a lesson than have them continue those habits until they get kicked out of college or sued in the workplace.  Successful cheating encourages more cheating and whether or people care about ethics or not the benefits are not worth the risks!  Furthermore, from an ethics standpoint, which I find even more important than eventual success, the accumulated guilt of cheating your way to success must be awful.  I personally am proud of my success as a student, an athlete, and a person (aside from driving) because I know that I have earned every bit of it.  If I had cheated my way here, I for one, could not live with myself!

Everything thus far has been fairly straightforward.  Most people probably agree with what I have said so far because I haven’t really specified what I mean by cheating.  What I mean by cheating includes a wide variety of situations.  This includes taking shortcuts in work that save money but put the product in danger.  This includes using insider knowledge at one company in another to benefit the company.  This basically includes everything that is against the law and in the end it not only is the right thing to do ethically but saves money over time.  Look at the story of the Ford Pinto where Ford did a cost analysis and decided it was a better idea to put people’s lives in danger than to spend tons of money to recall the defective cars.  Not only was that unethical but in the long run people found out about that analysis and they lost way more money than they would have had they been honest.  Look at BP and the oil rig disaster in the gulf recently.  Sure they probably saved lots of money taking shortcuts but I can assure you that they lost way more money when the deepwater horizon blew up in their face, not to mention the future money they lost due to a collapse in their image as a company.

In the end, it is always better to be honest than to take unethical shortcuts even if you think you won’t get caught.  It is the right thing to do and even if you don’t care about what is right (which you should anyway), it will probably make you more successful in the future.

engineering ideas

Here are a few of my engineering ideas:
Build a bridge from Alaska to Russia.
Build robots who play different sports.
Build a helicopter sports car.

iFoundry Revealed sorta

In modeling iFoundry as a system, I have broken it down into pieces that makes the system as a whole easier to understand.  There were other things that I could have included in the system like the history and how it evolved, but I decided to make it simpler by only including things directly relevant to the operating of iFoundry at the moment.  The diagram itself is decently easy to understand.  There are various levels and sublevels starting with the founders and administrators of the overall program.  Using funding from the university, iFoundry (now more thought of as iEFX) is broken into subcategories.  There is the class part of iEFX and the iCommunity component.  The class has a lecture and lab weekly.  The iCommunity has a group iHouse meeting and then breaks up into individual iTeams.  Students participate in all of these and give feedback to the top of the chain with the administrators.  Students can also become ELA’s in the future who help with the labs while TA’s teach the lecture.  The entire purpose of the iFoundry is to take students from the Engineering Community, improve their engineering skills and put them back into the community with a deeper knowledge of what it means to be an engineer and how to best utilize their skills.  Whether or not this happens is debatable but the purpose is the same nevertheless.

To tell you the truth, I did not really gain that much insight from doing this analysis.  I already knew the system and this was just basically a way to organize my thoughts which I already knew.  Had this been a more complicated system, this probably would have helped much more.  I think the most interesting part of this diagram is at the bottom left where the purpose of iEFX is summed up.  iEFX takes students from the engineering community, teaches them how to be great engineers, then puts them back in the community with that knowledge.  The entire system is designed to do just that.  I don’t really see any unintended consequences that some entities actions might cause other than the feedback the students give.  If the feedback is bad, the top of the system needs to rethink the entire system.

Labeling of Fighter Jet Refueling Mid-Flight

Communicating, Writing and Presenting in Engineering – free-write

I apologize for continually coming back to the reference of my internship over the summer at Packer Engineering, but then again I don’t because it was such a good experience that helped me understand what engineering is all about. Over the summer at the company, I not only got the opportunity to do hands on work, but I also got the “opportunity” to communicate, write, and present. I’m kidding with the quotation marks of course because it really was a good opportunity, but I don’t like that kind of stuff normally. What I really found from this experience is a general concept that seems to apply to most areas of life. If I totally applied myself to the project and got excited about what I was doing even if it wasn’t actually overly exciting, then not only would the writing and presenting be more fun but the resulting product would also be better.
One example of this happening in the Packer Engineering internship was a PowerPoint presentation I had to do on a disaster in history. I picked to do research on the DC-10 plane crashes and I went into the project knowing almost nothing about planes let alone those specific plane crashes. I decided to attack the presentation from all angles. Not only would I make a good presentation, but I would find out everything I could about everything to do with airplanes. This research really created positive energy for me and the people around me. People around me started seeing how into my project I was and they told me they were excited to hear my presentation. Additionally, I got to speak with the head of the company, Dr. Packer, because Packer Engineering had been involved in investigating the crashes themselves. He described in extremely high detail the sequence of events that ended in disaster. After taking pages of notes from the conversation, I made sure I understood everything he said down to the nitty gritty. On a side note and just to get this in here (this is a free-write after all I can say whatever I want), the high school interns got to take a field trip to an airfield and I got to actually fly a plane (and I got paid to do this because it was “work” so ha!) After all my research on planes, flying one really reinforced my knowledge base. Usually, I have a slightly monotone voice while giving presentations, but this time, I didn’t even have to focus on having an interesting voice because I was naturally excited about my topic.
It was one of my best presentations ever and in my opinion it sums up what it means to give a presentation in engineering. Even if the subject may not be all that interesting to many people, if you get involved in your work, enjoy it, and learn everything you can about a subject, your presentation will have a much larger effect on people.

Networking

            My experience expanding my network involved talking with my math professor.  I am in a class called fundamental mathematics which is a course outside of the normal engineering requirements because I am aiming at getting a math minor.  Going into this class, I was pretty nervous because I am not particularly good at proofs – the main focus of this class.  One week, I had some homework questions and I decided to ask Professor D’Angelo, who was our teacher and author of our textbook, for some clarification.  After class, after I asked my first question, we got into a philosophical discussion about the application of mathematics.  He started talking about the reason the specific question was in the textbook.  He told me about his experience in Europe and how a reporter there had tried to convert the change in temperature in Celsius to Fahrenheit.  The reporter had just looked up the value of the change in Celsius and converted it directly to Fahrenheit and the paper had read that the temperature rose “68 degrees Fahrenheit” in one day which is ridiculous but was a mistake made in a major newspaper nevertheless.  My professor’s point was that sometimes even the little things need careful attention because it is easy to get confused and when you move to tougher problems, the little details need to be set in stone.

            We moved on to some of my other homework questions and even though we got off track it was great talking to a man who had such enthusiasm for his subject.  He told me about his motivations for writing the textbook and how this class has really been a culmination of his lifetime’s work.  It really gave me a new excitement for being in the class because now I viewed every problem differently.  They weren’t just yucky proofs anymore, they were puzzles waiting to be solved.  My math teacher and I talked for a very long time and I was glad that I had a chance to speak with him.  He even told me that based on the homework I had already done, if I continued to do well in the class he could write future recommendations for me to get into honors level math classes.  It made the class seem smaller and more friendly and every time he passed out papers and he knew my name it made me feel like I was more at home in this difficult strange math class.

This conversation and the future conversations to come with my math teacher make me more confident and also have helped my networking.  Although this is just a little step in this direction, I can relate it to the “How to be a star at work” article by Keller.  In a work or college environment, it is not enough to just sit back, do your work, and hope people notice you.  It really pays off to talk to the right people and be friendly and not be greedy with your time.  I could have been doing many other things during those 45 minutes talking with my professor but it was important to get to know him and not be anxious to go do my own thing.  Overall, this conversation is the start to a relationship and networking connection that I need to continue in the future.