Power of Good Mentorship

I've been re-watching episodes of Star Trek Deep Space Nine lately. In an episode in season 2, Shadowplay, Commander Sisko is talking to his son Jake about future possible plans to join Starfleet. He encourages his son to start training (sort of an internship) under Chief O'Brien.

To me it seems like the kind of opportunity only fostered in a futuristic sci-fi TV show. But in reality, I bet a lot of engineers had similar mentors in their lives. Sysko confesses his son is in the bottom third of mechanical aptitude and O'Brien admits he was as well. That he didn't realize his engineering skills until he was on the front and had to make a critical repair.

In a way it's oddly comforting. I'm not one of those "born an engineer" types though I love it now. I do wonder how many young, aspiring engineers had a Chief O'Brien in their lives. Someone who was an engineer for a living and gave them a pretty good idea of what it was. Or maybe someone who worked in a similar trade. Maybe they taught them a few things and gave them a leg up or a taste of what they might want to do.

Given how many medical dramas there are and how few science or engineering shows, I wonder how many got into the field because of someone they knew growing up or fell into it later and were surprised to learn what it was all about?

More on STEM recruiting

In BusinessWeek Sophie Vandebroek writes about why the US must promote engineering. She doesn't really do a good job at saying why though and I think her article is more of a how. She doesn't say why the US would be better off with more engineers or with discouraging fewer people from staying away from the field. And while I agree with her general premise, some of her points seem too out of line for me to ignore.

First, kids should experience early on how much fun science is. In my family, we encouraged our children to treat the world as their laboratory. As my now-22-year-old engineer daughter, Nena, can attest, she and her brothers watched minimal television throughout elementary and middle school, so they were left to find more creative ways to spend their time. Their afternoons regularly involved digging for bugs, building furniture for their fort, and constructing makeshift dams across the sidewalk after rainstorms.

Great that she didn't let her kids watch TV but she fails to realize that her own background (she's the CTO at Xerox) enabled her to give those lessons to her children. Being an engineer is a decidedly middle class, sometimes upper class, career. It's true that technicians, and mechanics and carpenters and many blue collar workers do excellent jobs at convincing their kids to go to school for engineering but many more parents don't convey that message. Not because they're too good for it, but because just as many kids don't know what an engineer does many adults don't either. And if you grew up and your parents were nurses or secretaries you may not know anything about engineering. I like getting parents involved, but it's not people working in STEM already whose kids we need to reach. It's the kids who no one bothers to tell them what an engineer does or why they might like it.

 

Second of all, my sister and I (though we watched TV) had a similarly creative upbringing. But we didn't spend hours building dirt forts, rather we spent hours writing creative stories or writing computer programs. Not everyone's path to engineering is the same and I think the implication that all kids need to build stuff when not every engineering career is even remotely like that is a rather closed minded way of recruiting kids. If you like programming, or like solving problems, or like writing reports it doesn't mean you shouldn't go into engineering because all these skills are in the field as well.

 

The author also talks about expanding green cards and trying to encourage immigrants to stay here after college rather than going back home. But I have to disagree with her there. It's good to have a flexible immigration policy that allows for new people and new ideas but with our economy still bleeding jobs and with the great many engineers out of work I know I'd rather focus on recruiting underrepresented minorities into the field instead of foreigners.

 

Over at Under the Microscope they talk about a program to recruit girls into engineering, Spark Talented Minority Girls' Interest in Engineering, Female Recruits Explore Engineering (FREE). A mouthful I know. Funded by the NSF the program follows and guides young women from high school, through college, and into their career.

The FREE project focus group included mostly minority girls from Ohio, Colorado, and Iowa from the following additional demographics: most came from low socioeconomic backgrounds; all were recruited through their schools; all were girls who were strong academically in both math and science; none had family members or extended family members that were engineers (to ensure few preconceived notions of engineering); none had decided with any level of certainty on one field; and all of the girls agreed to simply explore engineering as an option.

I really like how we're showing engineering to people even if they don't choose it as a career. I would love for more professionals to just know about what engineering is not necessarily that everyone needs to pursue it. In this case they were doing a study on these girls so hence their goals of not choosing girls who had family members who were engineers, but I think that goal is fantastic. Not that girls and minorities who are related to engineers don't need the help and guidance, but clearly that's not the demographic we're having trouble reaching. I think perhaps that's a noble goal for outreach programs to target only people who would not otherwise participate.

Wimminz in STEM

A lot of brilliant and smart people have been speaking their minds lately about "women science bloggers" post Science Online 2011 and some other traffic. There's too many to hit all the great responses, but here's a list anyways:

Even when we want something we need to hide it - Kate Clancy

Self Promotion Tour 2011 - Dr Becca

Women and Science Blogging - Daniel Lende

Where are the female science bloggers? - scicurious

It brings up a lot of things Cherish the Scientist and I have been thinking about as we go forward with our new blogging collective EngineerBlogs (am I plugging this enough? GO THERE AND READ! ADD OUR FEED!). How do you make sure you are achieving diversity and looking beyond the people like you tendency we all have. I mean, it's easier for me, I'm a female blogger so naturally I'll gravitate towards other female bloggers. So how do you convince other people that intentionally recruiting for diversity is a good thing? I like Tenured Radical's post on affirmative action and the idea that merit is actually a system, or even better, the myth of merit. The idea that certain groups don't have distinct advantages from an early age or that our tendency to befriend, to recruit, and to reward people who are more like ourselves doesn't come into play with a historically white/male dominated world. This might be less obvious on the blogosphere, but it's certainly no less obvious in my life. Zuska also wrote a great and succinct post as well on the whole I want to earn this on my own when none of us really accomplish anything purely on our own merit.

It looks like they'll be hiring another female engineer here. The holdup now is she is supposedly "asking for too much" and negotations are occurring. I applaud her for asking for too much. And I wonder if a guy with similar education and experience who had asked for that much would have been categorized in the same way. No way of knowing really, I'm not that involved with the hiring process. Hiring her will bring the department representation of female engineers from 2.7% to 3.3%.

She's replacing a woman who left a while ago to teach. Sometimes I think because the last woman was so successful the people in charge thought let's hire someone like her and that's the only reason we're getting another woman. That if the last person had been a man, and good at his job, it would have been a man like him we'd be bringing in. Due to the other woman's leaving to pursue an alternate career (leaky pipeline? too limited sample size) she was asked somewhere in the offer stage whether there was anything she wanted to disclose, anything that might take her away from here. She mentioned then that she had just had a kid.

One of the people that interviewed her balked that she hadn't told him that, that throughout the multiple interviews she had failed to mention that. Clearly she should have said nothing. Sure, mentioning a pregnancy or future birth of a child might be appropriate by the presence of already born children certainly shouldn't be. She was already holding down a job, clearly she had it worked out. Not to mention the person who balked at it has a grown kid and presumably worked at some point in his career with a child just born. Or not to mention other higher level people in the group have little kids at home. We are reminded it is only a factor for women.

Some of my colleagues are dreading her being brought on and worrying whether she will be demanding or a tyrant of those she works with. But I'm not worried. I'm not one of those women who thinks it's hard to work with other women. I can't say every woman I've ever worked with has been my ally but many have and I've had fantastic peers and mentors that were both men and women. All the women I've worked for and with have had the same spectrum of the men I've worked for. I've yet to work under a real tyrant of a boss, but the ones I know about are all men. I suspect though that's an institutional thing and that the men in charge just wouldn't tolerate a dictator in the form of a woman, they'd make sure to encourage her out of the organization.

I look forward to meeting the new engineer. I hope we will get along and secretly I will try to help her and encourage her, even as the underling I am, as I have tried to do so for other women, minorities, and talented employees who I feel don't get the support they should for whatever category management thinks they don't fit into. Sometimes the things I hear or when I am called a bitch or labelled or put into a box makes it feel like death by a thousand cuts and I feel like giving up. But sometimes I feel like I'm a secret agent and my mission is to seek out these people and help them in whatever little ways I can. Maybe my little contributions will make up for the thousand cuts.

Robot Recruiters?

Despite the lagging economy and a serious lack of jobs for PhDs, even in science, there's still a push to get more people into STEM fields, especially science and engineering. Arizona State University is highlighting their FIRST Lego League as a way to use robots to hook kids on engineering at an earlier age.

 

I think this is sort of misleading. 99.9% of engineers will not get to work on robots for a living, or not the kind of robots they think. Sure you can work on your own projects in your spare time, but there's no pre-requisite you be an engineer to do so. I mean, working on robots through my engineering curriculum certainly exposed me to it but there are clubs and internet tutorials and books for motivated folks who have an interest. That is if your day job doesn't kill all the curiosity and creativity that you had for side projects. Not that I'd know anything about that.

 

Clearly these kids are too young to have seen the Terminator films and know the dangers of building robots, so I guess before they can see an R rated movie is probably a good time to trick them into trusting the machines.

 

So I don't know, is recruiting more and more people into a shrinking field unethical? Just because we as a society need more scientists, engineers and innovators does not mean we should necessarily encourage that if we don't actually support it with government funding or K-12 education or investment incentives. Getting more kids into STEM is not by itself going to keep companies from shipping more jobs overseas, professional jobs included as India and China start to catch up with a plethora of qualified engineers.

 

When I worked on my robot project in school one of my group mates asked if I could help him find a job where I work as he was still trying to feel out where he wanted to go. At the time he was working in an on campus lab making small scale electromechanical assemblies with PID controls and really enjoyed that. I had to tell him the opportunity to do such things anywhere else were severely limited. Start up companies in the '90s might have risked one time robot builds for specific applications but in general companies tend to go for the sure thing. And there's innovation, but not in a ground up building your own robot kind of way.

 

So there's two things I don't like here. One, that we let people believe that "robots" are a good storefront window display for engineering. Two, that bringing people into an industry that can't necessarily support their steady employment is premature until we fix the institutional problems at the top.

Engineering is Elementary

An elementary school in Minnesota is turning itself into a Specialty School for Aviation, Children's Engineering and Science. I like the idea of getting kids exposure early on to topics like engineering. But I dislike schools that tend to focus to narrowly on either a profession like this, or often language skills (which can be extremely useful if done well, or reduce the children's math and english understanding if not done well). I find it also kind of disturbing to see trends of pushing more people into the engineering profession. I think it's a great idea to make sure more people know about it and people who otherwise wouldn't have the option of going into it but have the ability or an interest to be able to pursue that but I fear programs like this give parents a false hope of a future stable career.

 

It's been all over the blogosphere about how there are a lot of PhDs in science. And post-doc salaries, as well as limited geographic choices and people leaving for other careers or not getting any job related to what they wanted would seem to imply we have an overabundance of scientists right now. Yes America, the UK and Canada need more scientists but they also need an industry and government foundation being the dual pillars of support for that innovation. And right now industry has been sorely lacking in this area for domestic development while government is fading away.

 

A little old, but this article discusses the myth of the engineering shortage. It discusses the H1-B Visa push in the late '90s to support a supposed shortage of IT and technology workers and how increasing education in China and India has meant where once we were competing with them for call centers or low level technician support now many professionals are on the same wave length as a highly skilled foreign workforce. And this opportunity is too much to pass up by domestic companies looking for short term profits. In fact for all the talk about a shortage of STEM degrees the article points out if you remove social scientists and technicans from the STEM umbrella past studies have looked at there has been a 130% gain in STEM degrees over a 20 year period while only a 30% increase in occupation. He goes on to state that given the graduation rates between 1993 and 2002 the US graduates enough workers in STEM to replace the entire STEM workforce every 15 years. Obviously, people don't retire every 15 years so unless there's economic growth at a rate comparable there's no possible shortage here.

 

Encouragement is not the primary issue assuming you don't care about recruiting minorities or women. According to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation 30% of incoming college students state science and engineering as their intended major. Almost half drop out. If half did not drop out, we'd clearly have way too many graduates in those fields to be supported by the economy right now. So why do employers complain? The article discusses what they call the "Monster effect" meaning the job board site. Employers can recruit nationally and internationally and don't need to settle for local candidates. Ronil Hira, Associate Professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology said the following:

"In the old days," he explains, "companies expected engineers to stay around a long time, so they paid for professional development. Now, they want somebody to hit the ground running. They've turned engineers from an asset into a variable cost."

Hira states how this means engineers and IT workers tend to train themselves, and therefore don't focus on specialities that are too specific and not as marketable in a larger job field. The article discusses the disparity present within colleges as well where business expect graduates to be good at project management and communication and so colleges shifted over to focus on these broader more transferable skills instead of focusing on hands-on technical knowledge.

 

If there was a real shortage, you'd see engineering salaries rising. But instead in the same timeframe average salaries for electrical engineers rose 10% and aerospace rose 9% while management climbed 14% and lawyers 12%. And a whopping 16% of US engineers are foreign born. On the surface this may not be significant, but it's much higher than the 11% of managerial/professional workers in general and I'm sure higher than less educated fields.

 

Is there a non-cost advantage to bringing in foreign workers? The article includes an anecdote from an employer who brought on at least one US entry level worker and has said he will hire no more because they were more project management focused and could do the actual design and execution of the design that he needed. He compared that worker to interns he brought over from Germany whom he claimed were much more hands on and strong with machine design and tool making.

 

I'm sure there's some selection bias involved here in bringing over what are likely the top of the crop of German engineering students looking to move to the US versus what might be a local candidate who is not at the top of the US pool of potential engineers. But I also thought of Fluxor's recent post on the disparity between the on paper qualifications of an entry level engineer and their actual design and hands on skill. And there is perhaps something to note in the differences between German engineering (as well as other more hands on local programs) versus highly ranked universities. I've noticed schools that rank higher in the engineering discipline tend to be pretty strong on theory and analysis which makes sense if you're training the next crop of students to be research focused PhDs but less sense if you're training them for the workforce.

 

I agree with the article's quandary that engineers must now train themselves in these specialized skills whereas 20 years ago companies would generally provide that training for you. I think anecdotally about my own experiences of going out and learning CAD on my own and paying my way through local programs before I ever even started my engineering program. Most of the older designers I work with were taught AutoCAD or Solidworks or ProEngineer through workforce programs that don't exist anymore. When there are a plethora of candidates with these skills that you can pick and choose from, you don't need to train anybody yourself anymore. Even my school learning of these programs along with whatever on the job training I could snatch up was not quite enough to qualify me for a job and a title. The old problem of entry level jobs requiring experience, but how do you get that experience. In a field like design, I feel like I have the skills but because my title isn't what a potential employer thinks it should be it isn't counted. They assume if I actually had the skills I would have managed a title change but there's no incentive from an employer to recognize an employee who pays for outside education or training. Especially if they can get that employee to do the work without the title.

 

So I think we can assume there is no shortage of engineers. I think we can also draw some conclusions that employers can now be way more picky than before, and that that isn't always fair but it is the reality. Future engineers will have to graduate with a strong grasp of the theoretical fundamentals, communication, writing and project management skills, as well as strong hands on design and machine knowledge. Only so much of this can be learned from University alone and I suspect as time goes on training at community colleges as well as individually motivated on the job training and increased pressure for internships prior to the first full time job will become the status quo.

 

No longer can an engineer go through college and expect to derive all of her knowledge from that experience but will need to stay knee-deep in school projects, reading some current research and manufacturing papers on their own, self-taught review of the fundamentals for the field in which that engineer decides to apply for jobs, and career-focused technician classes at night. I hope to see some of these hands on programs snatched up by larger research and state universities, but I do not expect it. It is the only way western engineers can remain competitive with their foreign colleagues.

What About the Boys

This probably makes me a bitch, but I don't like mansplaining with my coffee. Even if it's from a woman. I'm not sure why I started watching the video over at Machines Like Us. It's offered with no commentary, so it's hard to say what the poster's intent was. But the video coming from the American Enterprise Institute should have clued me into its being a load of crap since the rest of their videos are all libertarian mumbo jumbo about how taxes are what's wrong with this country. I really wish our elected representatives had to take an up or down vote on a public option and those that voted no wouldn't receive healthcare from the government. If they're so sure it's a bad idea, I'm sure they won't mind buying their healthcare on the "private market" like they suggest for the rest of us.

 

But this doesn't have anything to do with healthcare. This is all about why aren't there more female scientists? The video is snippets from some panel mostly with Christina Hoff Summers who thinks women choose to go into other fields even if they are equally apt because other fields are more fulfilling. She's also the author of a bunch of bullshit books about how there's a "war on men" (like the war on Christmas right?). I agree with some of her concerns, but achieving parity between the genders in college attendance is not something I'm going to freak out about. Does this really mean fewer men are going to college now or just more women? We didn't worry about it in the 1950s when there were way fewer men, so why start a national movement to freak out about a few percentage lower men attending some colleges now? And anyways, her goals are all wrong. It's not because we've "forgotten" about the menfolk or that we're rigging the system in favor of women. It's because while women are making gains, inner-city and poor men are losing ground. So this is hardly a gender thing so much as a class thing. And I agree we should make more of an effort to support inner-city and disadvantaged youths, male or female. But reaching out the olive branch to the middle class, educated white men who read her books or follow her bullshit is going to gain us nothing in further educating anybody.

 

Where does she get off talking about women in science anyways? She has an unspecified BA and a doctorate in philosophy. So she's been in the folds of academia and liberal arts her entire life. Maybe when she gets a job in a math or science career or talks to more than one woman in the scientific field without holding her preconceived notions I'll give a damn about her.

 

Her ignorance is further amplified when she suggests there's a severe shortage of scientists and engineers in this country and that it's the NSF's responsibility to recruit people, both men and women (though I assume she means men since women choose to do other things). I guess she doesn't know about all the hoardes of scientists and engineers that are out of work right now. How there are all these PhDs in science who can't find jobs or have to live separately from their families or take extremely low pay just to keep working supposed to contend with even more people competing for the same low number of jobs. I mean if she's even part libertarian she should know that if there's a market demand for these jobs, people will go into these careers. If we start creating companies that produce things and need scientists and engineers, people will start training in that instead of becoming lawyers or working on wall street.

 

Luckily for my blood pressure, someone sent me this article from 2006, Male Scientist Writes of Life as Female Scientist. Dr. Ben Barres is a neurobiologist who was once a woman and is now a man.

After he underwent a sex change nine years ago at the age of 42, Barres recalled, another scientist who was unaware of it was heard to say, "Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister's."

And as a female undergraduate at MIT, Barres once solved a difficult math problem that stumped many male classmates, only to be told by a professor: "Your boyfriend must have solved it for you."

"By far," Barres wrote, "the main difference I have noticed is that people who don't know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect" than when he was a woman. "I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man."

Barres underwent a lot of criticism for writing on gender differences, or lack thereof, and even though most of his writings focus on studies and data people assume he is taking things "too personally."

Some of those who argue against him tried to bring up a handful of studies again, the typical ones that argue that a man performs better at the highest echelons in math than women even though on the average, men and women perform about the same. Or other studies that suggest women are better at "verbal" things and men at computation. One of Barre's colleagues, Dr. Spelke, responded to the interview and has argued against making conclusions from such data that would imply genetic differences between male and female brains. Coming back to Ms. Sommers and her hackneyed theory that women "choose" to go into other fields and that is why they are absent, I love the quote from Dr. Spelke:

"You won't see a Chinese face or an Indian face in 19th-century science," she said. "It would have been tempting to apply this same pattern of statistical reasoning and say, there must be something about European genes that give rise to greater mathematical talent than Asian genes."

"I think we want to step back and ask, why is it that almost all Nobel Prize winners are men today?" she concluded. "The answer to that question may be the same reason why all the great scientists in Florence were Christian."

So non-Christian scientists or Chinese scientists in the 19th century European theatre probably just chose to do something else, something more fulfilling, right Sommers?

2012 Apocalypse

More crazy people are going on and on about impending doom in 2012. No I don't mean the doom that spells the end of the human race, I mean the mass retirement of the baby boomers.

 

Per this story on ABC News, an Aviation Week study showed 20% of STEM employees are now at retirement age with that expected to increase to approximately 30% in 2012. Aerospace companies like Raytheon and Boeing continue to worry about the mere 70,000 bachelors degrees awarded in engineering each year and the expected shortfall in US Citizens able to take on defense work.

"I have a lot of positions, but a lot of times I may not be able to fill them because I don't have U.S. citizens," said Lisa Kollar, executive director of career services at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, one of the top U.S. schools for aerospace recruitment.

Anyone out of work right now has heard that piece of crap already. Even with 10% unemployment companies are still complaining they can't find qualified talent to hire. It generally means they don't want to hire and would prefer working people to the bone. But for engineers I'll make an exception and say the other competing factor is employers want US Citizens working for H1B visa prices. You can't have your cake and eat it too, employers.

More importantly the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) put out this report about actual readiness for retirees. Even out of the richest quartile of Americans, and talking only about early baby boomers who are currently the most prepared to retire, 20% are still "at risk" for not having "adequate" retirement income. More average income people are in the 35%-50% at risk range. After 20 years of retirement it's estimated 30%-45% of middle income earners will run out of money. Boomers would need to save an additional 25% of their retirement portfolio to have a mere 50% chance of having adequate funds to retire on.

Unfortunately, given their proximity to retirement age, the median Early Boomer percentage for the lowest-income quartile exceeds 25 percent of compensation. This suggests that at least one-half of the households in this age/income cohort will need to find alternative solutions to the problem of securing retirement income adequacy.

What kind of solutions? Probably working longer. And averting the 2012 apocalypse.