Who Is In Charge?

How much control do you give others? I came to work today and it was a wonderful day – the sun was trying to shine, the temperature was not bad, I had enough work to do but not be stressed – it was going to be a good day. Then I got an email! No, I’m not a fan of the person or the message. But the person does not have control over me. This is my day and I choose to make it a good one.

News to Know

MSE 4334, Applied Materials Analysis, a new courses offered fall 2014. This course plans to discuss the fundamental physics of scattering events based on X-ray and electron interactions with solid maters. The lectures cover basic theory of X-ray scattering (powder X-ray diffraction), and electron scattering (electron microscopy), and a series of laboratory exercises providing some hands-on experience on those instruments.  I designed this course to interlink fundamental knowledge (e.g., crystallography) and practical understanding required to describe experimental results obtained from bread-and-butter characterization tools for materials science. This will probably help to understand multiple microstructures-properties relationships subjects taught in other 4xxx level courses. The contents of this course are partly overlapped with those in my MSE 5134, which focuses on Transmission Electron Microscopy.

MSE 3004H, Materials in Tomorrow’s World, a new course offered fall 2014. A new three-credit course for engineering or science honors students, which may be used to satisfy part of honors course work, as well as substitute for the courses Elements of Materials Engineering (MSE 2034) and Materials for Aerospace and Ocean Engineering (MSE 3094). This course cannot be used as a technical elective for MSE students.

ESM 2204, Mechanics Deform Bodies, will be offered at VT both in-person and on-line during summer I and summer II.

Important Dates

May 2 – Last Day to Course Withdraw

Helpful Tools

One day you will graduate and leave me for full-time employment. So, over the next few weeks I’m going to examine a topic that you will one day experience first-hand: the workplace.

With the rise of the current college students (sophomores, juniors & seniors) the US workforce will see five generations at work at the same time; an employee demographic that has never taken shape before. Currently, with four generations at work there are road blocks that need overcoming. These road blocks will only get steeper unless we work to remove the bearers especially with another generation added to the mix. Over the next few weeks I intend to share information with you that I hope will better prepare you. 

To do this we must understand these different generations….who are they?

Veterans (The Greatest Generation), born 1930-1945: 84-69 years young

The Baby Boomers, born 1946-1964: 68-50 years young

Generation X, born 1965-1976: 49-38 years young

Generation Y, born 1977-1990: 37-24 years young

Generation Z, born 1991-2000: 23-14 years young

The following chart describes these various generations’ workplace characteristics. As Generation Z is just now entering the work place their characteristics have yet to be defined. But we can work with this.

(All web sources will be provided at the end of the series)

Random 

There are over 12,000 species of ants.

Ut Prosim  

The Big Event is this weekend. I hope you signed up.  I’ve been holding back… here goes. Personally, I would rather a group of you band together and adopt a family that is in need than rake a strangers yard once a year and consider yourself done for the year. That is not service and you know it.  By adopting a family in need you can help them out from time to time; deliver groceries monthly, shovel their walk way in the winter or wash their dog.

How you provide a true and meaningful service to the community you live in is up to you.

Sandbox

An Engineer's Guide to Cats

An Engineer's Guide to Cats 2.0

 

My Schedule 

Scheduled meeting times are available 10-11:45 & 1:30-415.

To schedule a meeting please log into your Scholar account. Under the MSE Undergraduate Advising Tab use the sign-in tool to select a meeting time. Please know it will be necessary to click on “expand all recurring meetings” to see all available dates, then click on the date you would like to schedule a meeting and the available times will show. Currently, meeting times are available through April 30.