You Can't Please Everyone

Lately, I've spent a lot time thinking about people-pleasing.

It's been a rough couple of months at work and everyone is on edge, myself included. Friday afternoon, I pushed back against a coworker who was trying to take advantage of my helpful nature. By all logic, it's what needed to be done to keep myself from being walked all over. His excuse of ignorance of never having done this type of work in the past doesn't mean that it's suddenly my responsibility. It was his job to either learn how to do it himself, talk to his team about who does this type of work for them, or, if in a real pinch, ask me as a favor. If he had asked for help, I would have helped. But he didn't. He assumed it was my job to do his work, which it isn't. And to top it off, he tried to make it look like I wasn't doing my job to my team and I stood up for myself.

However, afterward, my hands were shaking. And it's been the only thing on my mind all weekend. I stood up for myself and this coworker probably doesn't like me anymore. Now, I keep rationalizing it every way possible. Why should I care if this guy likes me? I shouldn't like him. I was protective myself from someone overstepping. Anyone else in the same situation would have stood up for themselves so why do I feel bad? I shouldn't care.

But the truth is part of me cares. Some portion of me deep down cares what other people think. I have absolutely no problem speaking my mind to people close to me, but acquaintances and strangers are a different story. I have never sent back food at a restaurant. I make eye contact and smile at strangers even though I don't really want to. The contractors failed to clean up after themselves when they built the shop, but rather than yell at them and get them back to finish, I spent days sullenly bagging rusty nails and wire clippings they left in our driveway.

And beyond the part of me that cares what people think, a whole different part of me worries that this people-pleasing fear will hold me back. That it will keep me from rising up the ranks. How can a leader be afraid to make the tough calls? And more importantly, how can I be expected to stand up for other people if standing up for myself makes me this anxious?

The only thing that makes sense to me is that it's OK to care. It's not a bad thing to care about upsetting other people. Maybe it gets easier to handle with time and experience, but wouldn't it be a worse thing if I didn't care about upsetting people? All these motivational quotes about how you shouldn't care about what other people think doesn't make that feeling suddenly vanish. I have to imagine it's like public speaking: it's always slightly terrifying, but it gets easier and that anxious feeling deep down doesn't last as long.

At least that's what I hope...

Six Things I Wish I'd Known about Grad School

Let me be real honest with you: my grad school experience was rough. Like, the-hardest-thing-I've-ever-done rough. Most of that was due to my own naivety. I didn't understand almost anything about it when I started and it threw me for a big old loop. I made the assumption that grad school was very similar to undergrad, which it is 100% not.

{Sidenote: Three things to note: 1) My grad school experience was engineering based. From talking with my friends from other scientific backgrounds, their experiences were fairly similar to mine, but these tips may not translate perfectly to someone pursuing an arts or business degree. Maybe they do, but I have no idea. Let me know in the comments if you have one of those backgrounds how your experience was the same/different. 2) Some of my experiences may have been school-specific. I tried to stay general, but programs do vary. 3) My grad school experience stopped at a master's degree. As tips for entering grad school, my opinions should be valid for however long your schooling goes, but grad school programs do evolve as you go for higher and higher degrees.}

• While the grading is much harder, grades are much nicer. I wish someone had told me that you basically have to be failing a class in grad school to get a 'C'. The rubric goes something like: A - has a very good understanding of the material, B - is trying really hard but missing the mark quite often, C - not getting it at all. At the same time, it is much harder to get an A. Curving grades is not only expected, but required since the average on assignments is typically around 50%. In reflecting on my time in grad school, I can only think of one instance when I got 100% on an assignment/quiz/test and I was absolutely ecstatic. To get 100% in grad school, your work has to be flawless and with anywhere between 2-4 classes and whatever else is on your plate, flawless just ain't gonna happen. What this all boils down to: grades aren't the measurement of success they were in undergrad. I felt like I was failing every day, but my final grades never reflected that. As long as you are showing up and giving it your all, your grades won't be as bad as you think they should be. Hell, after my first semester, I didn't even check my grades anymore. I assumed if I was failing a class, the college would let me know. 
• There are many different ways to earn a degree. My college had three different ways to earn an MS. The first way was the research path. This is the path you would choose if you were interested in continuing on with a PhD. You take a fair amount of coursework, but in addition, you take a semester or two of pure research where you work on (and may even get paid) a project for a professor (your advisor) and write a thesis on it. This is like PhD program 'lite'. The second path involves taking only coursework. This path is great if you already have a job and want to get a degree in tandem. You'll probably only have the time to take one or two courses a semester, so it may take a couple more years to earn your degree. The third way is a combination of the two which involves mainly coursework with a final 'report' for a smaller project you work with a professor. This a great path for people who want to do research, but don't want to continue with a PhD. It's important to fully understand the ways you can earn a degree because often you cannot change your path once you have started. For my college, you couldn't be a teaching assistant, grader, or researcher if you were doing purely coursework. Basically, you can only do the coursework path if you have a source of income outside the university, a fact a friend of mine didn't know and got her royally screwed over late in her degree process. In other words: understand the strings attached to the money the university provides you. {Also, from here on out, my points relate more to the research paths.}
• Choosing the right advisor is just as important as choosing the right school. When I applied for grad school, I truly didn't understand how much of my fate was tied to the professor I would be working with. At my first campus visit, I thought I was considering the school, not that the professors were considering me. Needless to say, I didn't get any research invitations from professors at that first school. While the school name on your diploma will probably have the most effect on your future opportunities, your advisor will affect almost every aspect of your day-to-day grad life. My advisor expected me to spend every minute I wasn't in class or in office hours from 9 to 5 in the lab doing research. I got yelled at for showing up at 11 on Tuesdays and Thursdays even though I had a class from 9 to 11. However, I had friends who saw their advisor once every couple of weeks for a status update and that was it. Your advisor is basically your boss and (depending on the school) their power can basically go unchecked. Grad school is not like a traditional work environment. As scary as it sounds, you don't have the same rights as a normal 9 to 5 worker does because you can't just quit. You live with the fear that if you quit, you lose everything you've worked for up until that point. I did not get along with my advisor (more of the story here) so I was forced to power through and finish as quickly as possible. Here are my tips for choosing an advisor:
• The ones who already have tenure are much more laid back. 
• Read reviews for their classes. Often, most professors have the same attitudes about their classes as they do about their labs. 
• Understand their research environment. What's the break down of their lab look like? What type of degrees are their grad students going for? How far along are they? How would you fit into the hierarchy of the lab?
• Talk to their grad students. Do they seem happy? Stressed? Do they have lives outside the lab? Are they required to get papers published every semester?
• If you have grant money, you can basically do whatever you want. Now, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Grant money is basically scholarship money with the contingency that research will be done with it, most of the time, a specific project that earned the grant money. For most people in STEM degrees, the holy grail is the NSF grant. You propose a project and if chosen, you can end up with funding for your entire degree. Courses, living expenses, everything. What this really means: you get to choose your advisor, not the other way around. The biggest hurdle for professors is coming up with the grant money for research. However, if you have your own grant money, you just need to find an advisor who is working on something similar to your project and ask to work with them. It's a win-win for everyone. It's probably the best way to alleviate the stress of your entire degree being in your advisor's hands because it's your money. If you really needed to, you could change advisors, or even schools, and still be okay. Here's a link for the NSF program.
• Grad school is much more stressful than undergrad because it can be your entire life. There's no escaping it. Assuming you are doing some sort of research and aren't a trust-fund baby, it's your job, too. You go to class. You have office hours. You do research. You do homework. You hang out with fellow students. You go to conferences. You write papers. There is no limit to the amount of time and energy it consumes. It's not like undergrad with a nice little to-do list of assignments and when it's complete, you get to go enjoy your life. It's more complex and messy so it's nearly impossible to turn off. Some people embrace that all-encompassing feeling, but it just burned me out. I can't be 'on' all the time. If I don't get recharge time, I simply can't give something 100%.
• The last degree you get is the most important one, so if you didn't into your dream school for your master's, you can try again for your PhD. It's not common, but it's not unheard of, either. Part of the reason I chose my college was a compromise: I would get my master's degree while my boyfriend (now husband) got two years of experience at his job and he would follow me to a different school for my PhD. It was 2009 and the recession was at its peak, so jobs were hard to find. Since he'd had a job lined up since October of the previous year, it made sense to stay and give him time to hunt for a job near whatever school I chose for my PhD. And we would have stuck to that plan if I hadn't burned myself out in my master's program. I guess my point is this: it's not the end of the world if you end up in a master's program that you are not thrilled about. Your master's program doesn't have to be your PhD program. However, it is important to know that it is much harder to get chosen by a professor if they know that you just want to get a master's. Most professors don't want to waste their time with someone they would work with for two years compared to five. I'm not saying you should lie or omit these details, I'm just saying I know a lot of people who did.

Lastly, this is more of advice than a tip, but if you are considering going the grad school route, find resources and educate yourself. In hindsight, my high school really prepared me for my college application and enrollment experience. I cannot say the same thing about my undergrad preparing me for grad school. The best resource I had was my parents, but their experiences were from the 70's so it was a whole different bag of cats. Talk to your older friends, talk to your undergrad advisor, talk to your teaching assistants since they are most likely grad students themselves, talk to professors about what they look for in potential advisees.

This sounds really depressing, but my biggest 'what if's' revolve around the mistakes I made in applying and choosing a grad school program. It doesn't have to happen to you, too.

Let's Take a Field Trip to the Power Plant

I still don't understand how exactly I ended up at the Tucson's power plant with all my coworkers. From what I've pieced together, one of my coworkers, Mike, met one of his neighbors at a home owner's meeting. Turns out this guy is only in town for a couple of months while he set up the new solar power plant installation. Bing bang boom. Mike has convinced him to give our entire department a private tour.

Since the power plant is no longer along my commute, I was completely unaware that they were even building anything new. To sum it up, they've basically built a 400 meter field of mirrors which they can angle to reflect sunlight at a length of tube overhead. Water runs through the tube and is heated to super saturated steam which then powers the turbine.

Our tour started with a little lecture in the construction trailer on how all this works. Then, we moved onto the fun part: walking around under the mirrors. Since the installation wasn't up and running yet, all the mirrors were facing the ground, to protect them. It made for some great pictures.

The great thing about this new solar installation is that it uses water. Other installations of this type tend to use oil and need some sort of heat exchanger, which lose efficiency. This system uses water, the same water that is already being turned into steam in the gas portion of the power plant. It means that when it's daylight and the solar power is running, less gas is needed to power the city. The new solar portion reduces the energy needed in an existing system, which is apparently a very big deal to those in the know.

The water pipes run a hundred feet in the air above the mirrors. These specially-coated tube can be serviced by a little trolley suspended below them. That is a job I would not want to have.

So, next time you're driving along I-10 and you look over at the power plant, you can say you know what that ridiculous tower and mirrors are.

Executive Office

I've had an office for a couple of months now and it has been this unexpected boost to my career. It's been absolutely great.

Just as a bit of a recap, back in October, my coworkers and I were moved from our bull pen of cubicles to individual offices so that a lab could take over our space. With the lay-offs last summer, there were plenty of offices, so we all occupied our own hallway.

I was worried about offices at first because it would mean less overflow traffic for me. You see, when we were in cubicles, everyone had to walk past me to get to the mechanical lead engineer, so if he wasn't in, they would ask me. In the offices, though, this would change.

However, this worked out well. People stopped treating me like the lead's secretary, asking me where he was when he wasn't in.

Also, having an office has given me an air of authority. Especially given how I've laid it out.

I've created a command center. Two desks with computers that I can swivel between and my back is never to the door so people can't sneak up on me. Eliminating being jumpy apparently works for me.

Oh and speaker phone! I love speaker phone. No longer pressing the phone to my head for several hours a day just as to not annoy my coworkers.

With my own home base, I feel much less lost. I no longer feel like the scared little fish in the big pond. It's given me a little cave to retreat to when things get tense.

And keeping with the pond theme, it'll be real high class once I hang up the large duck print behind my desk that I bought at a garage sale. You know, once I bring it in one weekend. I'd still like to upgrade the guest chair, but I've been advised to not invest too much in your office. I'm not sure why, though. Maybe to not be seen as sucking up? I don't know why, but I'd still love a cozy vintage arm chair.

Upgrading to Real Walls

Recently at work, my coworkers and I found out that we're being kicked out of our space. A good portion of my department, including myself, have cubicles in a large open area. It's great for having impromptu meetings and generally just functioning as a team.

However, with the lab next door needing to expand and an abundance of empty offices, we are being moved into our own individual offices. In my whole career experience, which I guess really only spans six years and four places of employment, I've never had my own office office.

The move will have a lot of downsides. We'll be losing our conference room and work tables and have to go through the official channels to reserve rooms now. We'll no longer have an excess of storage space for the random prototypes and returned broken parts, so we'll probably have to make more space in our already overcrowded, disorganized, disaster of a lab. I won't be able to grab someone as they walk past to ask them a quick question.

On the other hand, there will be two MAJOR pros. Firstly, privacy. Ahh, privacy, how I miss you. I cannot wait for the first conference call that I can take on speaker phone. Honestly, I don't contribute much on most calls, so smushing a phone to my face for an hour for no real reason is a huge annoyance. The ability to have the radio on without earbuds. Being able to close my door if I need to really hammer down and get something done without interruption. The option to change clothes in my office, if I needed to for some reason (trying to change in a public restroom is the worst). Taking personal calls without feeling like everybody knows my business.

Secondly, I'll be able to have a space that's all my own. It's just so hard to make a cubicle have any sort of personality. I'll be able to turn it into what I want it to be. Hang frames on the walls. Have cute desk accessories. It will be my space and I'll be able to make it function most efficiently for me.

The big move probably won't be for another couple of weeks, but I've already begun trying to find inspiration. I know I would like to bring in a big, comfy chair for 'guests', hang some art on the walls, maybe add a lamp.

Here's my pinterest board of the things I've been collecting so far {Sidenote: I should really set a budget for myself because this could get crazy} and here are some of my favorites so far...

Any other ideas/suggestions/demands for my amazing new future office? Any tips on what NOT to do decor wise with an office? My dad says the chair is a bad idea because people will never leave, but that's ok with me. Friends would be nice.

Sometimes Engineering Isn't a Team Sport

I'd like to think that engineering is different than most professions. We work as a team to get something out the door. It's impossible to do something single-handed. Yet, that's not what my mentor would have you believe.

My mentor is a great guy and a great engineer, but he uses just about every smarmy, sleazy trick in the book to get himself ahead. Here's the thing: when you are good at what you do, no one contemplates for a second that you might be throwing someone else under the bus.

I've lost track of how many ideas he's stolen from me at this point. I admit part of it is my own fault. There are a lot of times when we'll just be talking, discussing ideas for one of my designs and I'll bring up a good idea. Since he's got at least ten years experience on me, it's nice to bounce ideas off someone who will be able to tell you if there's something unforeseen that could hinder it. The problem then arises when he passes the ideas off as his own later to the higher ups.

Here's the thing, I would NEVER take credit for someone else's idea. As someone who's job is basically creating ideas, that's about as low as you can go. It's like plagiarism. It's important to add the footnote of "When Blah Blah and I were talking earlier, he mentioned..."

And there's no real good way to call someone out when they don't give you credit. What are you supposed to say? "Hey! That was my idea!" I'm usually just left sitting there, with my mouth open in disbelief, wondering why this guy thinks that he should get to shine for my idea. Does he really believe that if I shine, he can't shine, too? Everyone already knows he's a much better engineer than I am, so why does he feel the need to keep me down?

He found a new way to outshine me last week. A problem had been brought to his attention and he was to find a solution. My only involvement at all was that he told me about the problem and we spent some time brainstorming some potential solutions. Easy enough, right? Just brainstorm until we brought the problem in front of the large group to get input. This was his baby and I was just the sounding board.

Once in this meeting, he said, "Carolyn has a topic" and through me under the bus. This was most definitely not my topic, but OK, I would just explain things to the best of my ability. At first, I actually thought he was doing me a favor because my biggest critique is that I don't speak up enough in meetings. This meeting was just to define the constraints and get some feedback before we started working on it. Low pressure situation.

As soon as I had finished explaining the problem, I mentioned several of the ideas we had discussed and the benefits of each. Turns out, though, he already had the perfect design in his back pocket. So here I am, bumbling on and on about these ideas we'd come up with together and he swoops in with the perfect idea, makes it very clear it's his idea, abandoning any responsibility for the other ideas I've already outlined. Somehow, all the crappy ideas were now mine and good thing he was here to save the engineering day!

Look, I understand that there is an inherent competitiveness in any job situation, but this guy is supposed to be my mentor. He's supposed to be showing me the ropes. He's supposed to take me under his wing. Doesn't he realize that when I look good, it makes him look good too? He's supposed to look out for me, not be the one I need to look out for.

If I only had the time, space, and money...

If you and 22 of your friends have 2500 hours to kill, why don't you round up 380,000 Lego bricks and build this?

Image Courtesy of Yahoo

The car can't drive and the doors refuse to open, but for $40,000 worth of Legos, it can be yours. Just kick yourself into time laspe like these Lego engineers and it will be over before you know it.

While this is cool, I won't be truly impressed until I see a fully functioning car built from Legos. So get on it people!

Observations of the Female Engineer

As one of only a handful of women at a fairly large engineering company, it's pretty easy to feel like an outsider. Also, throw in the fact that I'm the only one on my team who's under 30, it can make for a pretty unique work day.

Now that I've been working full-time for almost six months, here's some of my observations.

• My coworkers are very understanding and nice when I make a mistake because they think of me as their little sister/daughter.
• No one takes my ideas or opinions seriously because they think of me as their little sister/daughter.
• Skirts confuse people. Men automatically assume that if a woman wears a skirt, there must be something special going on. Sometimes it's 110 degrees out and I just like a breeze on my legs. 
• Yes, I get dirty, too. A good portion of my work involves repairing broken down robots, most of which covered in a thick layer of grime and dirt. For some reason, my coworkers are amazed when I'm coated up to my wrists in the gunk and have accidentally smudged it on my nose. Do they think that just because I'm a girl that dirt doesn't stick to me?
• They expect me to be upbeat and smiley all the time. For some reason, the older guys think it's ok to tell me to smile if I'm not while strolling in the hallway. Sometimes I'm thinking. Sometimes I'm pissed off. But independent of the reason, just because I'm a young girl to them doesn't mean I need to be all giggles and dimples.
• You almost always get the entire ladies room to yourself.
• It's ok, I have heard cussing before. You can see it in their eyes when they're censoring themselves. What's even worse is when they turn away from me and whisper the word to someone else.