Sigma Plot Fail

I've been using Sigma Plot to make all the graphs for my papers but I recently discovered that my license expired and I can no longer run the program.  The license is held by my work so I asked the IT guy to look into it - hopefully he can fix it.  If not I'll be remaking all my graphs in Origin because for some reason my company has (had??) licenses for both Sigma Plot and Origin.  I'm just hoping it will all get resolved soon. 

Research Posters

Made my first research poster two weeks ago.  I had never made a poster before (grade school posters don't count!) so I spent a while browsing the internet looking for tips.  These are the most helpful websites I found for me.

Scientific Poster Design
I like this PowerPoint from Cornell University because it gives text sizes for different parts of the poster (page 33) but it also has some nice tips on image file types and colors.

Advice on Designing Scientific Posters
Swarthmore College's Department of Biology did a really awesome job of putting together tons of information on scientific posters.  Their information includes sections to include and what to include in them, tips such as "posters with 800 words or less are ideal," when to use serif and sans serif fonts, and much more.  I think it's definitely worth a once-over if you're creating a poster.  I love their idea of having a button to press for a ten-second overview of the poster - great for when one wanders away from the poster.

I'm conflicted on the recommendation to color coordinate with the poster.  Clashing is obviously bad, it's always bad, but actually trying to match your poster?  It seems really weird to me.  I think a complementary color would be fine.

Other suggestions from the site include a coin envelope of business cards attached to the poster and 8.5" x 11" copies of the poster as handouts.

PhD Posters
Gallery of completed posters.  I think you can never look at too many posters to get ideas for them.

Poster Sessions Flickr Group
Gallery of many, many completed posters.  I'd rather see close-ups of the posters but that doesn't seem to be the intent of this group.


The above sites were just what I used to get ideas on creating my poster.  Do you have any recommended sites for poster creation?

Hey There You Structure

Every field needs a song written for them, like this one:



Cute.

Women Engineers

Example of a Woman Engineer.

Are you a woman engineer?  Did you know that women make up 20% of engineering school graduates but only 11% of practicing engineers are women?

A recent study from the Center for the Study of the Workplace about the retention of women engineers suggests that workplace climate is the largest reason for leaving engineering.  This endeavor, called Project on Women Engineer's Retention (POWER), surveyed women engineering alumnae from 230 universities across the United States totaling 3,700 women as of January 2011.  There was a brief blurb about the study that appeared in my ASCE Smart Brief and another short blurb in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the study.

Interestingly, the engineering majors with the greatest number of people to either never enter the workplace or left more than five years ago are Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Chemical Engineering.  I was hoping to relate this to the number of women in those majors but there doesn't appear to be any correlation.  Another interesting point is that almost half of that group had earned an additional degree, most often a master's of science (MS) or master's of business administration (MBA).  Turns out that some (try 70%) of the women who "left" are probably still at an engineering/technical company but in management or executive level positions with a third earning over $100,000.

 The key points from this study were (1) that almost half of the women respondents "left because of the working conditions, too much travel, lack of advancement or low salary," (2) one-in-three respondents left because "they did not like the workplace climate, their boss, or the culture," and (3) one-in-four left "to spend time with family.  Another key finding was that those who had left still had the same interests, same confidence in their abilities, and expected the same positive outcomes from performing engineering related tasks as those who didn't leave. 

Some findings from the study I thought were rather obvious, such as "women engineers who were treated in a condescending, patronizing manner, and were belittled and undermined by their supervisors and co-workers were most likely to want to leave their organization."  I think anyone who experiences that would be interested in leaving!

To me, the most surprising finding from the study was that "women who considered leaving their companies were also very likely to consider leaving the field of engineering altogether."  The situation they were in was so bad that it warranted leaving the discipline?  What?  This part leaves me befuddled, but perhaps its because I've never worked in such an environment.  I've worked in two different industry jobs, one a consulting company the other a manufacturing company.  They were nothing like each other but at both places I was treated with respect, like I was intelligent, and I was given opportunities to interact professionally with high-level managers - mostly presenting my ideas to them.  True, my job title has been "intern" for most of the time but I've still gone through the cycle of promotions & performance reviews, and I've never felt like some of the respondents from the study have.  Maybe if I had been I would understand why it would cause someone to leave engineering altogether.

I think the longer you work, the more you get a better understanding of other companies out there one could work for.  I have a list of a dozen companies that do things similar to what I enjoy that I could work for if my current company doesn't work out.  My Plan B has been "if The Company doesn't work out I'll just apply at Company X and Company Y," not "if The Company doesn't work out I'm going to become a crazy cat lady and live under the bridge." 

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that women are leaving engineering after working someplace rotten because it's more socially acceptable for them to do so.  I think it's safe to say that engineering is still considered a "manly" field despite efforts to reverse that stereotype, and that men who leave the field of engineering because it sucked would be highly ridiculed by their male peers.  Women on the other hand, would probably say to their female peers who leave engineering something like "I don't know how you did it for so long!" or "yeesh, that field sounds wretched, good thing you got out of there!"

This is just my uneducated guess, what do you think?  Have you ever worked someplace so horrendous that its caused you to consider leaving your field? 

No Heat?

Received an e-mail this morning as I was about to head to my school research lab saying the building was without heat.  As its been a lovely week with temperatures not rising above freezing I decided that I had plenty that I could do from my home office - no need to be cold!

Today's Home To Do List:

• Finish a midterm
• Develop welding parameter matrix
• Work on research poster

Locked Out

Last summer the key-card entry for the engineering building at my school was damaged in construction.  Engineering building, twelve floors, many students for classes, many graduate students for their research labs.  All locked out.  (No problem if you're a professor, you get a regular key!) 

Today it remains broken, with the official word on how to get into the building as "call the campus police to be let in."  The campus police always seem to be annoyed when they're called and also don't seem to understand why the key-card swipe isn't fixed.  I don't understand it either.  It's only been seven months since it was discovered to be broken.

I'm grateful to the other users of the building who recognize the ridiculousness of calling the campus police on really cold nights (the police can take 20-40 min to show up) and do things like this:

Yay!  

How do you say...

"Spending on technologies and services to discover, manage, filter, disinfect and desalinate water, improve infrastructure and distribution, mitigate flood damage and reduce water consumption by households, industry and agriculture is expected to rise to a trillion dollars annually by 2020."

- from a water conference in Canada

Can you say opportunity?