Engineer_Chicks

thought of you all when I saw this, kinda!

http://www.nerdgirls.com

it's some engineering students who are trying to spread the word that smart women are hot. they're generally against those either/or baskets that say that you have to be nerdy and shun everything feminine if you want to be scientific. they've been on msn and newsweek lately, so there's a good buzz going.

Hello all,

I'm currently in my foundation year of my electrical and communications engineering degree spending my lovely summer holiday researching for coursework. I'm getting a bit discouraged however. I'm great at the soldering in electricals class when we're making circuits and I ace my theory tests. And the physics I excel at. But the Maths :( I am terrible at simple Maths alone- I had to take GCSE Maths twice and then I passed with a C and for the life of me Differentiation and Advanced Trigonometry make me dizzy.Algebra I can do in my sleep, Boolean algebra and Logic are relatively easy but they only make up a fraction of the modules. Should I just give up and do something more practical or should I tough it out?

Most of my friends that have either finished Uni or are in their second and third years pretty much say the first year is the worst but I have 3 more years of this and I want to know if I'm wasting my time if I'm finding it extremely difficult to master a class dubbed 'the engineers first aid kit'.

I work for a job board, called GOJobs.com.
We have several major Engineering companies with job openings.
Many of these companies are specifically hiring for diverse work places.

Some of the companies include HDR, RW Beck, MWH Global, PAE Group, and many others.

I think we have something like 1,000 engineering jobs. From Mechanical, Civil, Industrial, and Chemical Engineering jobs.

Here is a link, Good luck with your job searches.

Engineering Jobs -http://www.gojobs.com/engineering-jobs.html

I am in the process of finishing my master's and continuing on to PhD, and have found that I am pregnant. Looks like I will be doing this more or less alone. Still nervous about telling my advisor, because I am afraid he may see this as a sign that I won't be as dependable for research (to him, research == life, just ask his 2 ex-wives). Anyone have experience being a mother during their engineering education, either single or married?

Name:  Jessica
Location:   Santa Monica, CA
School:  University of Illinois - Chicago
Degrees Obtained:  Bachelor's
Major(s): Industrial Engineering
Favorite class/subject/engineering interest:  Methods & Ergonomics
Employment status:  Industrial Engineer and Head of Quality Control.... and lovin' every minute of it!
Short-term and/or long-term education/professional goals:  Eventually I'd like to get my MBA and my PE certification
What would you like to get out of joining this community?  To have the chance to give and get advice to/from other girls in the engineering world.  While I've been lucky and haven't experienced too much discrimination for being a woman, however there are challenges that I've encountered that I'd imagine men don't. 

I have my EIT certification and some work experience. I'm starting to look ahead to sitting for the PE exam. (I'll be eligible in two years).

So for anyone out there who is licensed...

1. What prompted you to get your PE?
2. How did you prepare for the exam? How difficult did you find it?
3. Who did you get to write your letters of rec? (My state requires five.)
4. What are the pros/cons of being licensed?
5. Where in your career were you when you got your license?
6. Would you do it again?

Feel free to throw in whatever else you think is relevant.

Thanks in advance!

(Cross posted to engineers)

Name: Silvia
Location: Zürich, Switzerland
School: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zuerich (ETHZ)
Degrees Obtained: Bsc in Electrical Engineering (in September 2008, hopefully)
Major(s): Power Electronics, Mechatronics, Power Systems
Favorite class/subject/engineering interest: Power Electronics
Employment status: none
Short-term and/or long-term education/professional goals: finish Bsc in September 2008, finish Msc in September 2010
What would you like to get out of joining this community? Meet new people with similar interests (and sometimes problems)

From my IEEE email...I figured people here might be interested. The Fritz Award is described as the highest award in the engineering profession.

( Cut for text from email )

After one term in my current program, I seem to have become one of the two officers (one grad, one undergrad) of our WICS (Women In Computer Science, an ACM-W student affiliate) group for next school year. Right now, the group is not that active. It holds occasional social and faculty speaking events, helps students select classes for upcoming terms, occasionally brings alumni in to talk about their careers, and offers tutoring for women in the intro course for computer science majors (tutoring for this course is also offered by other entities, such as the Academic Resource Center). I have some ideas for activities/services that the group could do, and want to get feedback (and possibly other ideas). I would appreciate any thoughts you have.

Note that there are not many people in this group, and I have to keep that constraint in mind.

( Ideas )

I'm not sure how many people are looking for work right now, but my company is accepting resumes for a product development position.

A bit about the job:

You will be expected to carry projects from conception to completion. From first sketches to detailed design to documentation to facilitating manufacturing. Not all phases are present in all projects.

You will need to be comfortable communicating with clients, vendors, and coworkers.

Experience with consumer product development is ideal--especially in areas like electronics packaging.

We are looking for individuals with from 3-10 years of experience and consider advanced degrees as experience.

We value individual skill sets and interests beyond straight engineering coursework.

A bit about us:

We are small and rapidly growing company in Huntsville, Alabama. We provide engineering and design services on a consulting basis. Projects range from small electronics enclosures to large flat bed printers and a helicopter simulator. Clients range from government contractors to individual innovators.

We have machining and rapid prototyping facilities in house. We run Solid Edge (Version 20) for our CADing needs and use both FemPro and Algor as analysis tools.

You can check out our company website at http://inergi.com

A bit about the area:

Huntsville is a growing area with a population of about 150,000-200,000. Cost of living is (comparatively) low and the area is rich in technology opportunities. A large proportion of the population is employed as engineers, so salaries are competitive.

For extensive data (and charts!) check out this website: http://www.city-data.com/city/Huntsville-Alabama.html

Want more information?

I have been working for Inergi for 1 year now and I really love it. I am happy to answer any questions you may have about the company, the position, or the area. Either respond here or email me at mrsdragonswares AT gmail DOT com. If you are interested in applying, just email me and I will give you the name and contact info of the person you will need to send it to.

(Cross posted to various engineering communities. Apologies if you are seeing it more than once.)

First off, welcome to all the new members! I've been terribly lax in responding to intro posts but I'll try to do better, now that the madness of grad school application season has subsided.

My question is threefold:

1) If you took time off between undergrad and grad school to work, did you find it a difficult transition back to school? Fortunately I found a solution to the two-body problem - my soon-to-be husband works as a process engineer for U.S. Steel and I will be starting a Ph.D. in bioengineering at Notre Dame. Now that  I'm admitted, though, I'm starting to feel anxious about returning to school, especially with the intensity of graduate classes. My job has not been that challenging and I worry about all the things I've already forgotten. Is there anything I can do to mentally prepare myself?

2) If you are married or living with your SO, and he has an intense job as well, how do you cope? Like most new engineers at his plant, FI is expected to work 9-10 hour days with an hour's commute each way. Right now he is having a hard time adjusting and it is leaving him pretty drained at the end of the day. I anticipate a similarly challenging schedule, between coursework, hours in the lab, and TA duties. How do you share responsibilities for household work, and how do you make time for each other?

3) If you're a current grad student, do you take part in any mentoring activities, and how does your advisor feel about it? I was really active in SWE as an undergrad and Notre Dame has a "women in engineering" program that I'd like to volunteer with. However, I've heard that advisors often don't take kindly to any activity that could be seen as a "distraction" from your research work. Naturally, I don't want to overextend myself either. Any thoughts?

Thanks for any comments or advice you can provide!

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/mar08/6008


Feature article in the latest IEEE Spectrum about Christina Lampe-Onnerud.


"Only the initial capacity of batteries has been increasing, at about 5 ­percent a year. Today they are commodity products, manufactured in huge quantities and sold at vanishingly slim profit margins.

Change, however, is about to come. And it’s going to come from a pretty surprising agent: a 40‑year-old jazz singer, soccer mom, and research chemist named Christina Lampe-Onnerud."


Interesting stuff. Plus if you want to know the latest and greatest in li-ion batteries.

Name: Rachel
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
School: University of Cincinnati
Degrees Obtained: BS in Materials Engineering in ~3 months
Major(s): Materials Engineering
Favorite class/subject/engineering interest: metallurgical classes
Employment status: To start my job in June at BAE Systems as a survivability engineer
Short-term and/or long-term education/professional goals: Graduate, then TBD
What would you like to get out of joining this community? Meet other female engineers and network

If you want to learn more about what in the world materials engineering is, please ask! I love talking about it! Also, any SWE girls out there? I was president of UC's chapter 2006-2007.

Name: Laura
Location: Glendale, CA
School: Pasadena Community College
Degrees Obtained: AA - general one
Major(s): Mechanical Engineering
Favorite class/subject/engineering interest: calculus has been interesting. just started physics, kinda excited about that.
Employment status: working! at Tetra Tech, and engineering company. and as amazing as that sounds. i work in the billing department, NOTHING to do with the engineers. BUT! if anyone is looking for a job we are world wide always hiring.
Short-term and/or long-term education/professional goals:
    short term - transfer and finish my degree
    long term - get my PHD work for JPL (not sure how realistic those are, but we'll see!)
What would you like to get out of joining this community?
    see what its like for other women in such a male dominated work place. make new friends. just connect with other awesome nerdy girls like     me!

Does anyone else know of engineering departments that do an exceptional job, by field standards, at attracting and retaining women?

I seem to have landed in one such department for my post-bac (hopefully a master's, someday!) - the Computer Science department in the School of Engineering at Tufts. 44% of the faculty, including 75% of the full professors, are women. 25% of the degree-seeking grad students are women, which is still pretty good by field standards, but it was the faculty numbers that really blew me away. If you know anything about the numbers of women in CS, you know that's astronomical.

I'm curious about other departments out there that have done a similarly good job at this...and what they are doing right that other departments in the field are not. I haven't been at Tufts long enough to get a sense of this, but maybe some of you have been at such departments for longer. Do you think that it's mainly a snowball effect - that the presence of a relatively high number of women attracts more women and makes the culture friendlier toward women, thus raising the numbers even further?

If you know anything cool about a mobius strip, would you mind sharing?  I just realized that I knew nothing about the mathematical properties of a mobius strip!

<IMG SRC="http://www.sciam.com/media/inline/D55BA3C5-E7F2-99DF-3B0A5A55D41B63FB_1.gif">

I might never work with a mobius strip, but still I'd like to know things like how pi is involved with this phenomenom and its trigonometric properties.  Where it occurrs in nature.

I don't know how many people in here are regular readers of XKCD, but this hit home with me. So, up for discussion is today's comic.



Do you find that to be true in your experience? Do you ever feel like you (or the women around you, if you are male) are expected to represent all women? (For example: "Hey Sally, what do you think, as a woman?") Would/Do you consider that a good thing? A bad thing? Part of the territory? No big deal?

Hi, I just realised that I never got around to joining the community (and therefore posting an introduction), although I've been reading this community for ages. Better late than never. :)

Name: Kris
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
School: University of Sydney, Australia (undergrad), Univeristy of Western Sydney (Masters)
Degrees Obtained: BE (Mechatronics), BA (French Studies), Master of Fire Safety Engineering
Favorite class/subject/engineering interest: I always liked the ones where I got to deisgn/build stuff best
Employment status: Full-time engineering
Short-term and/or long-term education/professional goals: Get more experience in the real world (I've got about 5 years so far), and then maybe get into policy making.
What would you like to get out of joining this community? I don't get to interact with many other girls in the industry, so it is good to hear other points of view.