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what is a “competent engineer”? (possibly this is just part 1)

mumble academic success mumble

Thinking back, I can’t remember accurately how I felt freshman year. Now if I’d written things down in a blog post… So here I go, reporting on how I feel now as a senior.

Lately, it seems like my conversations with people outside of bland filler (well, actually useful filler like knowing what is going on in my friends’ lives, but I qualify filler as things not really interesting to people in general) is focused on theorizing about how people learn.

I feel like I’ve been lost the entirety of my time at MIT. About all I can say for myself is that I can graduate and I am competent enough to… to? I honestly don’t know.

I’ve always been trying to find that missing something that would let me have a happy pset / general academic experience. When I say that I don’t learn well in the traditional academic model, I’m resigned, not “too cool for school”. Maybe if I were more confident in seeking help. Maybe if I trusted that if I asked my friends questions, they would make the correct judgment call for themselves about their level of hosage versus their obligation to me. Maybe if I studied the material better so that I could ask credible questions (instead of my general “?___? what is everything” that I know can’t be answered effectively) at office hours. Maybe if I didn’t care if I should have tried harder, should have read the textbook, should have attended lecture, should have not taken a class without the prereqs, and spoke up in office hours anyway.

But maybe all I needed to do all along was be optimistic enough to bug people to help me. Maybe I wasn’t missing anything except believing, trying, not flailing around and simply thinking things are doable.

I don’t know. I had a pretty wonderful psetting experience recently. And thinking back, I can’t remember a single instance where I had an experience like this. Even given my terrible memory, it can’t have been more than a handful of times. I’d given up. I’d concluded that the only thing to do is muddle along and build things and try to figure out — if I could do it over again, what I would try to do to get the most out of my classes. What if it wasn’t that I was incapable of learning from school, but rather that I just never figured things out? That would mean that to help other people like me, the key isn’t to make cool things to build, but rather to figure out how to learn the most from lectures and not flail around and get lost and lose self-confidence in the meanwhile.

So much for being secure in my goal to remain excited about everything and defiant about not digging deeper into a subject.

Lately an MIT admissions blog post title Meltdown has been making the rounds. It’s really popular because it strikes a cord in most / many students here, but not everyone. Is it better or worse to experience extremes of emotion? As usual, I suppose there is no single optimal Kp for the relationship between amount of stress and drama / emotional response in a person — but I can still wonder if there would be a more optimal one for me. How do I become competent? Yet even the competent people I know feel inadequate to some extent. So what hope is there?

I know, I know. I’m focusing on negatives again.

Maybe I can try that as an experiment — not care what people might think, just care about what makes me happy. For just a few weeks, not care about the fact that I’m never on time either to meetings or with homework, take that as okay. This is something I am working on. I am just a person with flaws, which is okay. (At least I haven’t killed anyone). YAY more experiments! 😀

I think other people would find this weird. But it makes me feel better, so what the heck. I’ll be that weird person with the weirdly personal blog. Because it’s my blog.
edit 11/1/12 AHHHH i am such a terrible group person person.  i… i’ll leave this up here because i think everyone else deserves a reminder that you’re lovely.

what are real engineering

A lot of my confusion stems from trying to understand what counts as being a real mechanical engineer. Or what I would define as success.

Here are potential answers:

  • Having the confidence to build parts that people can rely on and won’t fall apart
  • Creating a start-up that reaches the injection-molding stage and is cash-flow positive
  • Being able to use and even more so maintain and fix mills and lathes and other shop equipment
  • Being able to competently TA a class and answer technical questions
  • Getting As in my classes
  • Being knowledgeable like Amy and Shane and Charles in being able to tell you how to build and source almost anything
  • Being internet famous for technical things
  • Being able to fix anything that breaks
    • Knowing about cars
  • Being able to make awesome things from trash
    hi nick
    you should update your blog even more, i swear you’ve made at least three more instruments since then. of course I’m one to talk…
    • Being able to identify useful things from trash
    • Having professors like you and think you are competent (or at least not disappoint them)
    • Being able to help underclassmen
    Basically this is a compilation of thing I wish I were better at.
    One thing at a time, I suppose.
    Oh nyancat. This has turned into another of those whining about incompetence posts. It’s interestingly hard to convince myself to tout my competencies. I can only do it when I feel really angry or snarky. I remember Amy and try to convince myself to not constantly focus on my incompetency, but rather accept it and work to remedy it. So that I can be that competent female engineer that the younger me could point to and say, that is someone I would aspire to be. Which is another annoying thing, competency is inseparable from the issue of gender disparity for me. -___-;; It’s kind of distracting and rather useless in terms of actually becoming competent.

    possible competencies

    Things I am good at:

    • I’ve traveled. A lot. I will always have a fascination with cultures around the world.
    • I’ve worked with biology
    • Wanting to fix things. Being angry yet entertained at the state of the world.
    • Being enthusiastic about people learning to build things
    • Thinking in absurd ways
    • Having lots of different interests
    • I can speak and read Chinese
    • ?___? I have no idea. Nothing on here is technical competence…
    I’ll leave it an open question for now. In the meantime, I am going to go sleep in the sofa under my loft, which somehow makes me feel better (except then I don’t want to get up), and then wake up and finish my overdue essay. Oh, and talk to facilities about washing trash cans at 8:30 am.
    segue! hello there, trash cans behind the student center.
    something is really off about my solidworks dimensions. oh well.
    i felt silly for spending hours CADing nyancat. but after spending hours CADing a trash can (yes, I suck at CADing / CADing efficiently) I would happily go back to internet meme engineering. Also then I don’t have to look at my teammates’ CAD and feel terrible. Oh right, I’m supposed to feel inspired by other people’s work.
    speaking of nyancat, 2.009 professor wallace shows up in a nyancat shirt sometimes.
    speaking of nyancat part 2, one of my hallmates (ben katz) got contacted by the creator of nyancat. He legit engineered nyanhat thing.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Speaking of classes…
    Strobe Lab 6.163
    Lab 5: Bullet Photography
    In other news, I have been making shiny strobe lab pictures, even if I’m neither building high voltage strobe circuits nor going to get more than a bare minimum B in that class.
    Bullet going through a stream of water. GIMP composite of four images, flipped horizontally.
    this was the setup for the water stream photos
    this was the setup for the LN2 carnation shots and shows location of the rifle (which we didn’t touch, the professor shot it)
    These pictures were with: Andrew Schlaepfer, Merritt Boyd, Monica Ruiz, and Prof. Bales
    They’re so pretty! This class doesn’t make me feel any more technically competent though.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Well, anyway. Aside from classes and wondering how other people define competency, I’ve been mostly unproductive in terms of projects. My immediate project will be the persistence of vision poi project, and then I have two major goals (aside from getting a job or getting into grad school).
    • Help make sure the open source hardware bootcamp in China happens this summer
    • Implement my kits idea in some form, where a concrete engineering curricula is implemented using physical kits combined with online delivery of content
      (eek. I have to talk to a professor about this. Also this is my one chance of getting into grad school. Also, remind me to braindump about 2.007x sometime, which is the alternative to implementing this as my own startup…).
    • Actually document my projects. I harp on people to document their projects, but I don’t really have my own cohesive documentation scheme ^^;

    With respect to thoughts about school, here is a pretty well-known TED talk:
    Ken
    http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
    A transcript can be found here:
    http://dotsub.com/view/8faa77e7-6d84-4ed6-881a-42bf4280929f/viewTranscript/eng

    Uncategorized

    General Update / Capture the Flag Competition

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    Whoa!
    I have disappeared for a long time.
    I hope to fix that by issuing… a series of short low quality posts! Or something.

     ~~
    I thought I’d briefly mention the MIT Lincoln Labs Capture the Flag competition.

    image credit: the CTF people listed on the image; from the lec 1 slides

    “In this version of a “Cyber” Capture The Flag competition, you will work in teams of three to both to defend your system and attack those of others. The target system is a Content Management System (CMS) Web Application with a plug-in architecture. New functionality will be introduced during the competition via plug-ins, so be prepared to adapt to novel situations quickly.”

    I’m in this with two hallmates, Pranjal and Cathy, and two dormmates. We’re not super-serious about it, but I am excited!

    Back in the day before — actually who am I kidding, I’m still this way — I thought that computer security was reserved for really cool people. Going into this, I have no idea what’s going on, which means anything I do I’ll learn a lot from (even if I don’t contribute anything to the actual competition). Yay! (yes, this is my “well i’m not taking any CS classes, how will i feel good about my minimal progress in becoming an engineer if I don’t try to pursue multiple topics, also everything is fascinating” syndrome kicking in).

    Unfortunately, the lectures are all during 2.009 lab meetings, but they put the slides up (whoops, j/k, they took them down as of 10/25/12). But for me, while I’m learning a lot, I still have zero idea of how to actually do anything. That is, actual practice.

    One way, I learned, is to check out previous Capture the Flag competitions. In particular Pranjal mentioned the Stripe one. There’s actually detailed walkthroughs for it, so I’ll be checking those out.

    image credit: https://stripe.com/blog/capture-the-flag-20

    ~~

    Oh yes, I should rant about that sometime. The whole attitude that: you’re completely lost but you should still try to do the lab because that’s how you’re supposed to learn things according to years of … tradition. Maybe that’s not the way I want to learn, maybe I want to not get frustrated and lost and not learn anything and have zero confidence in myself . Maybe I want to rush through things and then when I want to, on my own time, I’ll go back and learn things in depth for reals and prove to myself that I do have critical thinking skills. -___-; For instance, I don’t feel like I learned 2.007 in depth, but now I want to actually be a good UA, I’m going back and reviewing the material in preparation for next semester (and just to actually learn engineering / estimation instead of putting s* together and hoping it works). (although I have zero regrets about doing the PSTaHIW method first, since it’s given me the confidence / continued interest in building things that keeps me going and and gives me the confidence to go back and read up on all the engineering).

    Whoops, looks like I just ranted about it.

    Anyway.

    Additionally, I am tired of whining about myself on my blog. I do that enough in my own head. So f* hardcore engineering, I’ll place faith that I’m on the road somewhere and have fun in the meantime.

    To add to my list of things to blog about: 2.007x, post-graduation plans, cultures (MITERS) changing over time, confidence and asking questions correctly, miters seminars, the whole diy nanotech thing, parrots and swapfest, hair color, strobe lab (bullets!), how maker faire went (project packing optimization!), stepper motor position profiles, trash can washers and MIT facilities magic, things and youtube videos i’ve learned about china, emailing a jacob’s ladder, NHK filming, one-day loft, nyanwallace, 18 MIT seniors working on washing trash cans XD || veggie co-ops, camping trips, slugtalks, …

    (Side note: I wonder if I built a caffeine pill vending machine, would I earn money on any reasonable sort of time scale? Dispensing pills would be an interesting problem to solve, even if some days I hate trying to replicate work which has already been done infinity times by the invisible engineers of the past/present).

    I’ve decided to neglect nouyang.blogspot.com. The original idea was to have a blog that was presentable for job-like things, then I wanted to separate project and personal posts, and now I’m just going to try to blog, because I always find it worthwhile. Even now, I’m trying to dig up some of the files I made for MAS.863 How to Make Almost Anything, where I made a terrible site (required) and never put any of my files up, and I’m just sad. Sad. As in, there are five operating systems,  four computers, and a few USB sticks (some of which are no doubt lost), random emails in gmail, two dropbox accounts, and who the f* knows searchspace between me and my files. Sad. @___@

    Hexapods

    recap (maker faire, hackaday and hexarideablepod, emergency nyanpancake)

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    I guess now is as good a time as any to reflect on my years of building things (years now?!). Hello, crackaday.
    Quick note: hexarideablepod is run off of two A123 magic 12v batteries and is actually controlled by drill triggers. @__@

    First, a brief interlude.

    Back in the day I made some nyancakes for MAS.863. That was cut out on the shopbot from pink foam, around which I poured a full pound of easymold two-part silicone mix, aka $26.52 1lb Easymold Silicone Rubber (price has gone up since then).

    one of the earlier tries. turns out it’s sad without a mold release agent, aka vegetable oil.

    Kind of pricey for a single cake. Most of the silicone goes into the areas around the nyancake which can’t really be hollowed out without doing a two-part mold process. Being utterly lazy, I didn’t do that.

    Well, lately I’ve been thinking that a better idea is to make cute little nyancupcake molds. So Saturday around 3 am when we were packing up getting ready to leave for maker faire, I decided to emergency nyancake.

    • 3:19am

    Nancy R. Ouyang
    hi charles, can i 3d print a tiny nyancake right now?
    like 1” x .5 ”
    if not that’s okay!
    i recognize i am slightly crazily procrastinative

    • 3:21am

    Charles Guan
    squee squee squee
    0_0 do you have the stl?
    it’s gonna take like 15 minutes just to heat the machine up
    i somehow think this is a bad idea 0___0
    if you’re really down i’ll go heat it up right now

    This actually turned out pretty well!

    Files: https://github.com/nouyang/orangenarwhals-nouyang-blog-files

    So then I was staying over at Dane Kouttron-wrote-own-software-for-giant-robot-arm-turned-3d-printer-currently-printing-[transportation to be disclosed] person. After getting home from maker faire I took my 1 lb Easymold Silicone Putty ($20) (putty, because since this is way smaller I don’t need to pour in the silicone) and mashed the two parts (white and purple putties) together and then stuck it into the mold. The only issue is I lost one of the eyes which wouldn’t come out of the 3d print.

    The next morning, I pancaked! Using box pancake batter. This turned out surprisingly well — the pancake batter resulted in lots of holes yet it held the shape pretty well. We vegetable oiled the interior, spooned a bit of batter in, used the spatula to speed flip everything over, and let it sit for a few minutes, and then took it off the burner and let it cool to medium hot (this is a theory, that letting it cool a bit = contracts and better shape retention, and cooling too much = well idk).

    ahhh one-eyed cat pancakes

    Then once we got to maker faire I had this awesome idea of getting someone to 3d print me a slightly larger cake mold and ask the pancake printer people to make some pancakes for me.

    Some helpful people in the 3d printer pavilion printed this out, although it finished after we left so no pancakes :'( Ah well, good shot at emergency maker faire project.

    Note spider webs, sphincter compared to earlier print; need more drool control 🙂 Appears to be branch from MTM snap. 

    Okay, so back to existential crisis.

    (I am totally doing this to intro all my projects so far, because I’m shameless. Also I made a portfolio recently and realized I should actually organize things).

    I would count 2.007 as the first time I really started building things (which is an interesting thing in itself — does this mean I only count electromechanical things I built mostly by myself?). As usual I’m plagued by my sense of inadequacy. Because I try to point out to my friends how awesome they are when they talk about their failures and envies, I can recognize the symptoms of this cognitive distortion. And at maker faire — I got a hackaday post off of what I would call a ripoff design, when all my friends have made such awesome projects. Just at maker faire, there was Bayley and Kramnik‘s oneTesla (soon to be kickstarted), Nick’s wholly unique forging-his-own-path-at-MITERS musical instruments and tricopter, Charles’s chibikarts, Shane’s crazy motor controllers, tinykart, and quadrotor, also Ben Katz’s I’m-a-crazy-freshman (okay Kramnik is too but he’s not new to MITERS) awesome!scooter, dgonz‘s scooter and robot arm, Hunter Bank’s let-me-almost-make-an-entire-scooter-in-two-days (designed beforehand), Dane‘s crazy death scooter (pics not up yet), Ted‘s bike-scooter, and a ton of projects

    oh robot hexalord all the projects

    Anyway, you see what I mean? Here I’ll list out how I think about my projects. I’ll roughly list my projects in my scale of rather inadequate to completely inadequate. Mostly it’s a combination of two axis — how much engineering I put into it and whether it actually worked or not.

    1) hexapod 18 servo
    — failure because I never built controls / even sensors for it. Also now dead in the water because after several plane trips, I appear to have killed the pololu serial servo controller – a whopping $50 — which goes to teach me a lesson, buy things with the bare minimum I need because I’ll likely destroy it ;___; . To become legit: need to make actual (3d printed?) case for it, also figure out servo calcs instead of beast-it-and-hope-it-works as I’ve been doing. Figure out how to write inverse kinematics controls, make a GUI interface, make it dance.

    2) hexaridaeblepod
    — failure because I did very little engineering — almost entirely a ripoff of the epic rpalanteo instructables. Also I don’t think I’ll be working on anything other than maintenance for a long time. Well, maybe add some LED strip lights and a speaker playing nyancat, because I am apparently hexapod nyancat project person.

    fewer kids than last year, also no rides the second day because I didn’t have batteries because other people’s projects ate them… ;__; the whole reason I brought hexarideablepod was to give kids rides
    Also it runs much faster / scarier at 24v but I seem to be on a blowing-up-controllers spree right now.

    3) Nyancake
    — failure because zero engineering involved besides CADing the model.

    4) persistence of vision yoyo
    Failure because I never actually carried through on it and got it working (display text) with rotation, and got it to work as a yoyo. Although I did learn about charlieplexing, wrote terrible pov yoyo code which only worked when you waved the yoyo in a straight line.

    5) 24v motor controller (h-bridge)
    Well, I attempted to make this in 48 hours. That was a fail. I am most sad that I failed to even get to test it because I had issues with routing tiny traces under components, which the mill didn’t cut out, and also soldered the caps on top instead of poking out the bottom so I couldn’t reach the leads to solder them down. Derr. Fail. It was a simple H-bridge controller and I couldn’t even manage that despite lots of help from the thorough documentation on Charles‘s and Shane’s blog. Also it played into the pattern (yay cognitive distortion) of me not finishing final projects. -___-;;

    6) Electronics vending machine
    — failure because oh yea, speaking of not-finished final projects, this was for MAS.863, I made this over 48 hours — CAD’d and lasercut over 24 hrs — and I skipped the entire final class for it and only brought the half-working thing to the open house. Professor Gersheneld, I’m super sorry for taking up a spot in the class and not doing my fair share of work, although I guess in the end I am the only who lost out.

    7) Random lasercutter stuff
    (lab glass, business cards, clock)
    — failure because, well actually I really like the lab glass present for Dan Fourie (found glass of reuse = free gift for putz cruftmas), but for the most part, no engineering involved.

    gift for my friend, alice chung
    clock face for what was actually supposed to be a waterjet-marble class, but I wimped out.
    Cathy Wu! and anodized aluminum laser-etched..
    yay fuzzy pictures. “MIT 2013, Meche (2-A), ~dream it. build it. ~ orangenarwhals.blogpsot.com”

    8) Nyanweight
    — failure because I intended to make a 3d nyancat, but ended up making an engraving only because I spent countless hours and couldn’t get masterworks to overlap the cuts in the right order (yay pixels = many paths ending on the same point).

    speaking of which, I don’t know where i put this. oops.

    9) hexapod reading group
    Katy Gero took charge and spearheaded the lasercutter – bristol board – doube-sided tape replica of berkeley biomimetic millisystem’s hexapods. Cool linkage design. So again I had nothing to do with the design, although I’m happy I inspired people to make things.

    credit: katy gero

    10) nyantart
    — failure because it is entirely a derivative of lvl1 work. Zero engineering! Yay GIMP trace of bitmap on internet!

    hi lasercutter <3>

    11) Metrify wireless sensors
    — failure because I didn’t do any board design (all by mark spatz) — I was more business “cofounder” (no, we didn’t pursue the project as a startup, but it did help me get a job my amazing internship at fitbit). also uber thanks to startlabs for funding us and redstar ventures for hosting us.

    daww generic chinese nrf24l01+ knockoff of nordic breakout board.

    12) 2.008 project
    — failure due to my terrible grade in that class, also I don’t feel like I contributed much to my team. I didn’t pay enough attention to lecture even though I am fascinated by manufacturing, I didn’t learn all the ins and outs of the magical mold-making process since I worked on the thermoform mold.

    does it say MIT? or hell?
    Hmmkay. Look, all the dumb projects I have done.