thinkfetti

I’m an “outside member” on a search committee. “Outside” means I’m in a different department from the one looking to hire a new professor. “Member” means I was invited to participate in the selection process, and my opinions make some difference.

The search is for a Chemical Engineering position, and although I know the chemical engineering job panorama isn’t as grim as mine (music/conducting/humanities), I hold to the somewhat old-fashioned idea that applicants should take the time to make sure the materials they submit for consideration are professional-looking and as error-free as possible. (I’m sure that part of the reason I hold to this idea is that I spend hours upon hours paying attention to these details whenever I apply for anything, and that I feel slighted whenever I receive a poorly-worded rejection form letter in reply. But enough about me.)

The applications I read today were, on the whole, indicative of souls who loved research, were tolerant of the expectation to teach while at a university, and were absolutely impatient with the expectation that they were expected to communicate effectively and thoughtfully in their job applications.

I am far from the final say when it comes to the selection process. I will express my discontent (and even exasperation) to the other members of the committee, but the final selection will possibly have little to do with my commitment to thoughtful, careful writing in the job application venue. But I will offer this plea to future job applicants:

Please pay attention to what you write - even if you’re applying on a statistical basis (oh, let’s see. I have a 0.5% chance of getting this job, if the recipient is chosen at random. I’ll just throw something together, and if it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t), please show — in a convincing way — that you care. Merely saying that you care isn’t enough, for me, at least. Be professional. Be detail-oriented. Don’t let the first page of your resume end with a heading….with the content only continuing on page two. In your statement of teaching philosophy, don’t say how you “would” without saying how you “do,” except if you haven’t yet had a chance to teach. In that case, why haven’t you? Just tell me - don’t hypothesize without context.

I want to read your application - I do, and we all do. But please, take my time as seriously as you take your own time…for both our sakes.

I have a lot of books going. (You can see just how many - and which ones - by looking at my “my reading list” page) Part of the reason for this is that I buy books for various reasons: when I need them, when I’ve seen them at someone else’s house and picked them up for a minute or an hour and decided I need them, when I know I’m supposed to be professionally interested in them and would feel too guilty if I didn’t buy them, when the cover or the topic or a randomly-selected page convinces me I would be happier with the book than without.

That’s the input side.

The processing side (oh, let’s just call it reading) is frequently hamstrung by my general lack of available time, or, more accurately, by the fact that I spend most of my available time working on other big and little projects. So I don’t finish books in one sit-down-block-of-time. This is another part of the reason for so many books-in-progress.

A third reason is that I have as many intellectual moods as I do emotional moods (if not more), so I feel most comfortable when I have just the right book around for my current intellectual mood.

So it’s quite a stack. This way of threaded reading isn’t particularly efficient, but I am pleased to know that efficiency isn’t as high on my list as suggestive, cross-fertilizing prose and poetry.

In the spring, I’ll be teaching (or at least facilitating) a course called “Creativity and Innovation and Interdisciplinary Problem Solving.” It’s a “pilot” course, meaning an experimental course, but I’ll be drawing on materials I’ve used in several other courses I’ve taught.

I’ve just set up the (first try at a) blog for the course at http://nmtdesign.blogspot.com/ because I read on slashdot that Google has released Blogger from beta testing, and I figured this is as good a place to start as any.

The point of the blog is to see if a bunch of networked students in a class about networking can or will initiate some interesting (to me and to them) communication behavior and get some great work done.

What follows is the gist of the course, excerpted from a document I presented several weeks ago to the chairs of the engineering departments:

Intended target audience:

Advanced undergraduate students currently involved in junior or senior design courses or working on other research projects at NMT.

Texts:

V. Fey and E. Rivin, Innovation on Demand: New Product Development Using TRIZ. Cambridge University Press, 2005. (Required.)

S. Savransky, Engineering of Creativity. CRC Press, 2000.

Description for students:

This course will introduce you to the TRIZ framework, an outstanding tool that will enable you to analyze design problems effectively and develop innovative design solutions. TRIZ (a Russian acronym that stands for Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadach, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) was initially developed in the 1940’s but only began being used outside of the former Soviet Union in the 1980’s.

TRIZ is helpful in avoiding design compromises. For example, if we wanted an object to be stronger without being too heavy, a compromise solution might suggest settling for some added strength and some added weight. A TRIZ-generated solution, by contrast, might allow for substantial improvement in strength with no additional weight.

TRIZ can also help an analyst forecast technological development of a product. Insights into what kinds of qualitative changes a system will undergo as it evolves can help engineers and other leaders make strategic decisions about where R&D efforts will be focussed. The tools TRIZ brings to bear on this problem were developed by studying tens of thousands of patents and distilling trends of technological evolution of systems.

During this course we will also examine the more abstract design problem of how to facilitate effective communication between individuals and groups who have differing specialties and who may model problems completely differently from each other. With the many technologies now coming online for realtime communications, there should in principle be many opportunities for engineers, scientists, and other scholars and entrepreneurs to collaborate in spite of their geographical separation. A current NSF-funded project will begin to explore the possibilities and emergent problems of using the cyberinfrastructure (CI) as a collaborative tool for scientists. As part of the NSF program, a seminar entitled “CI in Science” will be attended remotely by graduate students and scientists at several universities in the Southwest including New Mexico Tech. In this course, we will use the “CI in Science” seminar as a case study to study the technical, organizational, and communication-related problems of a complex system.

David Allen’s book is called Getting Things Done. If you look around the web, you’ll find evidence of GTD’ers, talking and blogging about their experiences with this project-management/organization/de-stressing tool. The blog 43 Folders is named after an example in Allen’s book of a “tickler” file system, a particular way of using a set of file folders as a (nearly) foolproof reminder system.

About two weeks ago, I bought the Getting Things Done book, and about 10 days ago, over the weekend, I invested about 14 hours at my office, getting things set up to use the time-management system.

The first thing I’ll say is that even if I were to give up on the “GTD” method right now, those 14 hours have paid off by providing me with an excellent perspective on where I stand: with respect to work, with respect to my personal goals, and with respect to my previous relationship to the work I felt was hanging over my head.

The second thing I’ll say is that the subtitle of the book (working from memory here), “a guide to stress-free productivity,” is apt. I have been working very, very hard the last 10 days, because I have had to, but I am getting much more done, and done more effectively. I’m exhausted, yes, but I think that without GTD, I would have been nearly as exhausted while feeling more stressed and getting much less done. I am optimistic that in a few weeks’ time, I will be feeling even less burdened.

I’m sure I’ll write more about my experiences later, but for now, I can simply say: if you’re feeling overwhelmed, trying to be productive while holding on to indeterminate lists of everything you “have to do” in your head, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

A thank you to Brian Borchers, who alerted me of an XML problem in the RSS feed for thinkfetti. Of course, now I need to figure out how to fix the problem. Brian said he was trying to view the RSS feed using Firefox with the Sage extension.

If you are reading this and think you can help me fix this problem, please send me an email or post a comment.

If you are reading this and don’t know what RSS or XML are, I’ll just say visit again soon, because in the next day or so, I’ll have another post up that doesn’t have any mention of these acronyms…