Author: John Bartos

Timesheets

For the last 20 years, I wake up every Monday to fill out a timesheet. It doesn’t matter if I was on vacation, sitting on a job site where there is no internet, hungover somewhere, or on my death bed. There is a timesheet that is signed. If the timesheet is late, some high-level corporate person is raining brimstone on that portion of the corporate ladder. Those hours are money and they need to be invoiced as soon as possible for cash flow.

The timesheet that records every minute that I work for the previous week gets assigned various projects and certain time intervals. The projects are either billable (to a client) or nonbillable (overhead). The goal is to have as much billable time as possible and minimize the nonbillable time. Bonuses, promotions, job security are all dependent at the end of the month, quarter, or yearly billability percentage.

At the same time, there is pressure on the people (project managers) running the projects from the people who pay us (clients) to work on project. They have to meet budgets and deadlines for deliverables. So, they are trying to minimize the amount of time worked on a project to make the budget to look good in front of the client (and get more work from them) and keep the corporate accounting departments away. When projects go in the red, companies don’t want to pay for the overages and headaches if they can’t bill (get paid for those hours) it.

If you lie on your timesheet and pad your hours, it is the kiss of death (if you get caught). If you are on a project that the US government is the client, your company can “lose the contract” (lose the job) if you “fudge the hours.” The temptation is always there. Well, who will ever know if I add a couple of extra hours on this project number if I didn’t work it? I have been in the field all day, I am going to put an extra hour or two to make up for a crappy day here in the rain so I can get a little more overtime pay. On the flip side, project managers are squeezed as well. It is very easy for them to call someone up and say that a person needs to switch your time between projects due to the overrun. Shucks, it is the same client and it will be invoiced.

Accountability (pun intended) has to be at all levels. If the trust in the validity in the hours are lost with either a project manager or a client, the person “fudging” their hours are looking for another job or the company with the project will lose the client. This engineering ethics lesson is learned every week over a career in private industry.

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What have I learned….

I went to the Oxford dictionary and looked up the definition of Pedagogy.  The most applicable entry was “The art, occupation, or practice of teaching.”   I want to be a better teacher when it comes to being in the classroom but also in the real world.  I want to explain technical concepts better for a person that does not have the background.    That is what I do in my real life for my job but also as a parent.

I have learned a lot in the class.  I have collected a lot of “dots” borrowing the terminology from Seth Godin put in his TedTalk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXpbONjV1Jc).  I am trying to collect these dots because this world of the university is foreign to me.    I have spent a lifetime exploring the world around me after growing in ultra-rural Montana.   I lived in upstate New York, the big city of Atlanta, the rocket building city of Huntsville, Alabama, and now the mountains of Virginia.   So, I am not afraid of going to places where I am not comfortable and sometimes not welcomed.   During my travels, I learned to be quiet and listen to the world around me.   This class was just another journey into a world around me because I do not have the background.

I came into the class thinking that I was going to learn the concepts and tips to be a better teacher in the classroom.  There was some of that with the problem based learning and the networking sections.  I think side-ways learningn is included but I am just confused how it works.   However, the vast majority of the concepts of the class is social justice.   I was not familiar with all the concepts and the nuisances of the application of social justice into the classroom.    I got to learn communist ideology from Brazil to environmental activism in Appalachia to black liberation book club.   I heard the terms like “revolution” , “the need to take over the system”, and “you can’t separate social justice from pedagogy.”

When I came to Virginia Tech, I was advised by multiple people inside and outside of the ivory tower of academia  that I need to check my political beliefs at the gates of the university.   In the university that proclaims inclusion and diversity, my opinion is not welcomed.  I watched in the group discussions that if you don’t hold the social justice line that you were debated down.  This class is just a bigger microcosm of today’s society.   There is no civility.   The university is not a place to express your opinion unless you hold the party line.

So, I connected the dots.  I learned that I do not belong in the hallowed halls of the liberal arts university instead of learning how to put a better powerpoint presentation together for a lecture.

 

 

 

 

How a road cut in Montana shapes a carrer

Road cut When I was going through engineering back in the dark ages, the professors went to the State of Montana and asked for projects that the State needed to be done.  I don’t know if the professors got paid or not.  I had about a half of dozen “school projects” that was handed over to the Department of Transportation or the Environmental Protection Department.

In Lombardi ‘s 2008 post (https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2008/1/eli3019-pdf.pdf), I was trigged.   She asked the following:  “What, then, are the kinds of “tests” our students will actually encounter beyond the classroom? How can we prepare them for a career of lifelong learning?”  I came back to a project from my junior year that I carry today.

To make it quick, there was a “road slope” on a highway about a hour east of the school that was shown above.  I still remember exactly where it was twenty years later.   We went out twice for an afternoon measuring all the fractures and the angles of the road cut.   The State of Montana asked for our class for our opinion on what they should do with a 1/2 mile section running through the mountains.   So, my little class of a dozen kids in Geotechnical Engineering went out and did our thing.  I remember preparing my little engineering report and my “recommendation.”    My class mates did all of these elaborate designs on how to cut back the mountain to eliminate the risk of rock falling into the road.   I did all the calculations and made the recommendation of not doing anything.   The road has been there for over 50 years since they blasted it.  I was the only one in the class to make this recommendation.

Over the summer, I got a call from the professor.  The road cut collapsed into the road about a month after I submitted my project.  It took 6 months for the State of Montana to clean out the pile of rocks and fix the road.  The professor wanted to make sure that I knew what happened.  She wanted to make sure that I knew that I made the right recommendation.  It was her recommendation as well to the State.   The recommendation was made on the available facts and I was able to defend it with my report.   Defendable was her word.   She wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t “knee jerk” on the next project and “overdesign” it.

Eventually, I got into the real world.  I don’t get grades here.   I get contracts.   If I do a good job that is better than my competition, I get more work.  More work means that I get paid.  If I get paid, I can keep doing this gig.   If I fail, I get sued by a bunch of lawyers and I lose money  I don’t get grades.  I make money.   I just make sure that my work is the best that it can be and it is defendable.   It all comes back to a project that I got a grade but that grade doesn’t matter now.   The lesson was invaluable.

With all due respect Ms. Lombardi , school is giving you the tools to succeed in the real world.  It doesn’t end when you shake the president of the university’s hand.  I get graded everytime I win a proposal.

 

 

 

 

Go to hell Nicholas Carr (figuratively and not literally)!

Butte-Winter_Nora-Saks

Photo:  Taken from http://www.mtpr.com.   Butte, Montana in Summer  (This picture probably was taken in the winter but it could have been taken in July.)

While I was reading Nicholas Carr‘s article “Is Google making us stupid”  (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/) in Atlantic Magazine, I reckon back to my undergraduate days in the small university known as the Montana School of Mines.   As an 18 year old, I decided to go to Butte, Montana for school.  For those who don’t know, Butte is a former town that had a million people that mined out a mountain for its cooper and zinc.  Now, the city has only 36,000 people and the skeletons of its mining heritage.   The city is also a mile high in elevation and the winters were brutal even in Montana standards.   Then, the Montana School of Mines was male-dominated engineering school of 3,000 hearty souls that did not have much of a “nightlife.”  It was said that you had the choice between studying, drinking (Butte does not have an open container law), or sleeping.  Don’t get me wrong, I had a wonderful education to get me set on my career and plenty of cheap Rainer/Olympia beer.

As a freshman, I was bored.  You can only rearrange your dorm room so many times (15 times the first semester) or play cribbage or hearts.  I had homework but I was diligent about it so there was a lot of extra time.  So, I went to the library.   As a young and budding geologist, I would sit through the journals in the large dusty books.  It wasn’t until Christmas break that an article from the Geological Society of America that had a hypothesis of the makeup of Rodina.   Rodina was a supercontinent that formed before its more famous cousin Pangaea.   As shown below, western North America (Laurentia) was connected to southeast Australia and the center of Antarctica.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEAT_(hypothesis)

Rodinia_reconstruction

So, I started with the one article and grabbed the articles that it cited.   I would run with a little cart and go down and photocopy the article.   I would then take it up to my little dorm room and read those articles.   Those articles would cite other articles that would start the cycle again.  During the process of slipping down on a Friday night to grab more articles around the library or enter data into a new fangled database program called Microsoft Access, I was learning a new subject that I wasn’t going to learn in school.    During my sophomore year, the library got an electronic database program that you can look for either authors or the articles it cited.   I still had to get up and chase down the journal on the shelf but now I can speed up the search process and find the newer articles.  It was a dream come true.

During my junior year, I presented a variation to the model above as an undergrad at the Geological Society of America Annual Conference and my little abstract was selected for their media guide.  All the hours in the library with the dusty journals and the bill for $250 that my advisor got when he got the bill for photocopying charges when he gave me his “code” was worth it.  I learned to read journal articles and absorb the content very quickly.   It got me my ticket for my graduate education at Syracuse University when I met a professor at the conference that became my advisor.

Today, I have the library in my pajama pants.  The days of going out into the cold or blowing off the dust off a journal is over.   I go on to google on the computer and pick a subject.   Boom, there are 10,000 articles.   With a little sorting and some more keywords, I go to the journal and hit the libx button.  The webpage form the publisher thinks that I am accessing it from a Virginia Tech library computer.  I press another button and there is a pdf sitting on my screen.   I can then take the title and put it through Google Scholar.  I can see the articles that have cited it.   I can get a pdf of those articles with a couple of mouse clicks.  The hours that I spent looking through the dust of the library and carrying them off to a photocopy machine are over.  I have now time to drink a good bourbon, read a good book, and enjoy much better weather in southwestern Virginia.

With all due respect Mr. Carr, you can take your Atlantic article and the belief that the old days were better and go to hell.

 

 

 

What happened to the overhead projector?

800px-OHP-sch

I am old.  I am a dinosaur.   I learned and started teaching with an overhead projector and mimeograph sheets.   As I write this blog post, I am trying to guess when they disappear from the land of higher learning?  Do I need to include a wikepedia link for to help my classmates that read this post that has no idea what an overhead projector is?   Am I that old that I miss the days that the TV rolled in on a high cart which means we had a substitute teacher?

I read ‘s article about laptops and phones in the classroom and I thought about the overhead projector.   When I was taking classes while watching the pterodactyl flying out the window, this was all the technology in the room.  My goal through high school and four years of engineering school was to get as much information from that pre-made transparency into a notebook.   I got really good and trying to synthesis the notes and taking clues from the teacher/professor for a particular portion of the notes that will be on that mid-term or final test.   I would then take my notes back to my little dorm room and recopy them with particular definitions or equations from the textbook to supplement the notes.  My fellow class mates would come and buy portions or all of a set of notes for a class.  That money went along way in buying cheap beer and a dinner somewhere.  Somewhere in the process, that grainy 20 years old transparency sunk into my head that I could put back onto that test.

Now, I sit twenty plus years later in the state of the art classroom with projectors and webcasting of someone who is attending the class from a bar in the airport in Dubai.  Everyone has a laptop or tablet sitting in front of them.   If the professor flashes something up on the fancy screen, a person can whip out their camera on their smart phone to make sure they didn’t miss it.  If I don’t understand a definition, I can google it and it is at my fingertips.  I don’t need the textbook or go the library because it is at my fingertips.

The etiquette is now different.   If you have a cell phone, you hide it under the table so the professor doesn’t see you texting your significant other or check that Facegram or Instabook account.   I always try to sneak a peek at the open computer next to me.  The vast majority of the people are surfing the net, social media, looking at job sites, or trying to do the homework for the next class.

I read Anya Kamenetz’s arguments for the pros and cons of this technology.  She missed the point.  It isn’t about trying to engage students better so they are too busy to be distracted or a teacher has to ban technology outright.  She missed the responsibility of the student.  It is up to the student to learn the material.  It was no different copying notes from the overhead projector or today off the fancy touch screen.  If the student wants to do something else, the student has missed out the opportunity to learn the material that someone thought he or she should know.   Leave it up to the student to sink or swim.  That is how it is in the real world.

My guess it was 2001 when the overhead projector went the way of the dodo.

 

 

 

Was it worth it?

I know that I should post a blog about the virtues of blogging and networking for the GRAD 5114.  I know that network learning is important and changing the paradigm for learning in the higher education setting is important in today’s digital age.

Yet, I am hung up.  Through all the Week 1 readings and youtubing (that’s a verb right), I keep hearing Michael Wesch’s  What Baby George Taught Me About Learning  video discussion of was it worth it?   I have been going to graduate school now part time for 5 years now at the age of 41.  That comment keeps running through my head.  Is it worth it?   I have an established career for the last 20 years.  It wasn’t all roses and parades.  There was a lot of sweat and lumps of being in the professional world.   Yet, here I am with classmates that 1/2 my age or could be my own children.  The questions have not changed that was expressed by Michael Wesch.

I went through my undergraduate and masters twenty years ago.  I look around and the only thing that is different is the internet.   I had a notebook and a pencil.   Now, everyone has a computer that gets puts in front of them.  Instead of doodling in the notebook, the distraction is surfing the web or looking at the instragram.   Everything else is the same.   The vast majority of the students don’t want to be there and just want to check the boxes off so they may graduate someday.

I read recently that only 4.5% of all undergraduates will pursue a higher degree.  Does that mean that 95.5% are just checking the boxes for that sheepskin?  I don’t know.   Being in the real world,  my employer wants master’s degrees to show that the potential employee is smart but the PhDer is an egg-head.  Personally, I feel that the vast majority of the undergraduate degree is learning the jargon of the degree and what the “elders” of the profession feels that everyone should learn that they will not use again.  The learning comes in the halls of graduate school or out in the real world of the chosen profession.     So, the 95.5ers are not learning their craft in the haloed halls of academic institutions but in the hustle and bumps of the real world.

 

 

Future of the University

I am the right one to comment on the future of the University.  I have been in the university system now for 8 1/2 years (4 years undergrad, 2 years Master’s, and 3 1/2 years part time PhD).  My undergrad was in a little school where they pumped out engineers.  The faculty’s only objective was to get us ready for the real world of mining, petroleum, or environmental.  They gave us projects to get us ready for what our future employers would need.   I went off to the big research school for my Masters and then much later for my PhD.   The only thing that mattered was the research money coming into the coffers.   Teaching students was a necessary evil.   I slaved away on classes in my undergrad that would help me in the real world and the research school said those classes aren’t necessary to do research.  Everything was the next grant from the government.   The students in the research school wasn’t intended to go into industry but to another research school.    The research school is not a think tank for research.  Why doesn’t Virginia Tech get away with students?   It can be like VTTI or the Hume Center to do just research.   I hear the disagreement that it is a land-grant school and the betterment of the Commonwealth.   When did a professor outside of the agriculture school or nutrition actually went down to Wytheville or Galax for advancement of the land grant philosophy?   Someday, the research school will realize it is for the education of the students…..

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5K Scholarship to watch Terps Football. Is it enough to watch that bad team?

The University of Maryland is paying scholarships to students to stay through their home football games.  An alumni has donated $5,000 schlorship that is announced at the 4th quarter of each game for a random student.   If the person isn’t there, then the scholarship is rolled over to the next game.   They had to do it 3 times this season.  I am floored.  The money is not designated to help a University of Maryland find a cure for cancer or helping under represented kids from Baltimore.   Wow, football is surely king.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2018/11/23/college-football-one-big-ten-school-paid-students-stay-games/2081646002/

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The Toxic Advisor

I found this blog (https://smallpondscience.com/2015/12/07/what-to-do-you-have-a-bad-phd-advisor-in-grad-school/) interesting looking at what you can do when your advisor or PI is “toxic.”   I found the following section to be interesting in the latest MeToo movement:

Having a manipulative PhD advisor is not normal. Having PI that takes advantage of you is not acceptable. Having a PI that puts their career advancement ahead of your own professional development is not something that you or any other grad student should have to tolerate.

I wonder how many students have a bad experience at graduate school?    I have been in the academic setting at the graduate level for now 7 years.   I have always heard about students that left for various reasons in their program.   There are always professors that are whispered about avoiding either their class or labs from other graduate students.  In today’s society with the MeToo movement, these professors and their malfeasance are becoming more in the forefront of the academic setting.

I wonder how many students left in this situation.  I can count a half dozen of students that left due to the poor situation with an advisor.   I always find it interesting that there are limited fall back resources for a graduate student.

 

 

 

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Twenty things I wish I’d known when I went back to graduate school working full time with a family

I saw this article about the “Twenty things I wish I’d known when I started my PhD” that was posted to help graduate students.  I agree with almost all the points that recent PhD graduate Lucy A. Taylor presented at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07332-x.

I have been doing this school thing for now 5 years with working full time and rising a family.  I watched my wife being a graduate student fulltime for a year as well.  I thought I would give a list of “Twenty things I wish I’d known when I went back to graduate school working full time with a family.”

  1. When I first entered my program, I was asked what would sacrifice when you get in a pinch?  Will it be school?  Family?  The job?.   It took me a year to realize what it was.   It was sleep.   That what would sacrifice.   Make it a priority to get a minimum amount of sleep.
  2. A graduate program is a game of checking the boxes for the department and the graduate school.   It is taking a class and getting the various assignments done.  It is the annual report for the department in the spring.
  3. Make progress even if it is at a glacial pace.   The rock can’t collect moss.
  4. Your kids will never be that old again.  Enjoy the ride.  You only get 600 weekends with them before they are out in the world.
  5. View life as chunks of time.   There is a chunk of time for various activities.   If you have an extra 10 minutes, fill it with something productive that will help you later on that it isn’t a time suckage (i.e. internet or social media).
  6. TV and movies are overrated.  Your friends will make fun of you for not knowing the latest hot movie but I can tell them the latest of regression techniques for contamination trends.
  7. You have to say “No.”  You can’t do it all.  You have to have priorities.  If you can’t do it, you already have too many balls in the air.
  8. You are going to be going at all times.  It is taking that work phone call while walking to class or taking the kids to ballet.  You will be doing homework in a hotel at 4 in the morning to balance that work meeting at 8 and that homework due at midnight.
  9. It is your degree.  It is not the schools or the advisors.  You have to make the sacrifice of your time.  Time is a commodity.  When you are 20, you have all the time in the world.  When you are 40, time gets much more important.
  10. Take of yourself mentally and physically.   You can get burned out very easily.
  11. You will have a giant sign on your forehead to the rest of the students around you that will say “J-O-B.”  You can give them “advice” but you have to be very judicial on who you can be a reference.
  12. Your employer has to be onboard.   Your spouse has to be onboard.  Your advisor has to be onboard.  Your department has to be onboard.   If anyone of those folks have second thoughts, you are sunk.  Get a support network.
  13. Get everything in writing.  The people in the department will leave or retire and things will change.
  14. Just smile when someone complains about the lack of time they had.  They have no idea how much their life will change once they are pulling the 40-50 hour grind and they have to get someone to a practice at the same time dinner has to be on the table.
  15. It can’t be perfect.   When all I was doing was graduate work, I would recopy my homework to make it look perfect with no mistakes.   Now, it just has to get done.  Nobody will care if you had that perfect score in that class.  All they care is that you have that piece of paper called a degree.
  16. Nobody wants to hear about your research.  You got a 2-minute explanation at a 5th-grade level for folks that aren’t in your degree program.
  17. Ask questions.   Ask all the questions you want because you are paying for it.
  18. Take chances.  You never know where the river will lead.
  19. Never take a class from your advisor.  The expectations are always too high.
  20. Get some sleep.

 

 

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