What THEY Didn’t Teach GAR at Engineering School
In 1992 I wrote an essay: What THEY Didn’t Teach Me in Engineering School. Just this week I found a 1995 letter from my dearest and best friend, Dr. Gretchen A. Rau, PE, in which she gave me her own thoughts on both my essay and her own experiences as a woman engineer in the 1980’s.
I admired Gretchen’s thoughts in 1995, and I admire them now. I have Dr. Rau’s permission to share her thoughts, although she tells me that she no longer is the person she was in the 1980’s, nor even the woman she was in 1995. She also feels as though some of her reflection has some ’80’s feminist thinking — she is not sure now that anyone expects women to take notes or get coffee if they’re a professional. Read more
Converting Cubic Centimeters as Life Lurch
One of the largest of my life challenges was converting cubic meters to cubic centimeters.
In 1973 I was prospecting in the Stikine Range of northern British Columbia as a blaster and geological assistant. My colleagues were college graduates in geology and they out-ranked me. I had no college education – I had picked up my rudimentary geology and geophysics knowledge on the job since 1969. My boss was Arne B~, a fine geologist and Geological Engineer. During previous prospecting seasons, he had advised me to go to school and get a degree to advance my career in mineral exploration. Read more
What THEY Didn’t Teach Me in Engineering School
I left the University of British Columbia in 1978, so long enough ago that I have only a hazy recollection of the courses, exams, assignments and other hurdles I had to leap over to earn a degree in Geological Engineering. I remember little of what I was taught by THEM, but THEMselves I recall as generally kind folk, often too busy to explain the magic of Linear Algebra, or the weirdness of Nth Disordered Partial Differential Equations. THEY were overworked and professorially remote, and when I asked “What good is this stuff anyhow?”, some would chant the mantra: “You will find this background useful; You will find this background useful; You will find ….:’. Read more
Drs: Suck Your Lollipops
Last Sunday Pablo S. called me to tell me that he is now Dr. Pablo. And he thanked me for steering him firmly to his PhD in Civil Engineering at Stanford University. It was sweet of him to thank me for encouraging him. He is shy to use the Dr. bit but I told him to roll the syllable around his mouth and his mind for a while to savor it.
My friend Adda Z. was was lollipopped today. She walked down the long corridor of the Graduate Division office at Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley to file her PhD dissertation. After a few minutes of rifling through Adda’s lovingly crafted stack of typewriting, the lady behind the counter (no doubt) beamed her smiling approval that Adda’s manuscript conformed to the University’s format requirements. And then the kind lady gave Adda a lollipop in reward for her 4 years of hard labor. So, Adda is now a Dr. of Civil Engineering cum Lollipop. Read more
