Turning The Corner

It was about 3 p.m. today, (Thisisafaketimezone standard) when I was settling down a budding engineer regarding the troubles of his design when it finally occurred to me: I am getting old. With the first parts out of the mold in one hand and a set of calipers in the other, I couldn't help but focus on the young engineer and think about myself and my experiences/lessons learned in my first years of engineering. Although I didn't have a "moment" that required handkerchiefs and Hallmark Cards, thinking about this situation has really occupied my mind this evening. Thus, the topic of my post today.

First of all, studying in a university is less basic than basic training for the military in my honest opinion. Unless you are planning on working for a university, of course, which I realize a few of you are. Fortunately/unfortunately, depending on who you talk to, my internships helped me realize ahead of time that most of what I was going to learn in college was useless. Early on my coworkers explained to me that besides some basic trig/calc/physics, most of my classes would be more of a test of my mental endurance than instructions for becoming an engineer. I first met this with resistance, but after working in the "real world" for some time it occurred to me that they were dead on. Since graduation I have launched several projects and designed many products and never sniffed a line of calculus... thanks for 6 calculus classes Thisisafakeuniversity.

True, I left my university more educated than I was when I entered, this I can not deny. It made me a smarter/better person and dramatically improved my social and drinking skills as well. If there was one thing the classes directly taught me it was how to overcome adversity and prepare for a challenge. The course specifics changed every semester, however, preparing for a test remained the same. This in fact could have been the most significant thing I learned in school besides keg stands and euchre. Happily, exams ended when I graduated but reality set in quickly and it had its pro's and con's as well. Coping with the fact that I left school basically knowing nothing was a little hard to swallow. After all those classes, I basically knew how to do push ups but I didn't know how to play ball.

After a few months of OJT with some senior engineers I managed to get the freedom to do some designing on my own. This was not new in the fact that I was designing, I had done this as an intern. It was new in the fact that I was doing the work and sending the parts to prototype, not sending them to my boss for approval. After a month of hardcore CAD time I published my work in our system and sent a few critical parts to get prototyped. I was pumped, this was going to be perfect. Shock and awe. Well, both did in fact happen, but not in a good way. I learned just how big millimeters looked in person when my first prototypes came in. Many of the features I designed worked well, but they were just too small and not strong enough. I was embarrassed and devastated. My boss being experienced and wise looked at the whole thing as a win because what I designed was actually pretty good, it just needed to be scaled up a bit to add strength. Obviously a little peeved at my failure, I went directly back to my desk and started working again not bothering to look at the rest of the parts. My boss came up to me and kind of grinned and had a seat in my grey-blue stereotypical cubical and proceeded to give me the best professional advice I have yet to receive. He explained to me that nothing is ever going to be perfect the first time. (Duh, I was cocky and I thought bullshit, I should have got it right.) He went on to explain that yes, it could have been better. Yes, a lot of times it can come out right. However, regardless of this, it's how it ends that determines your paycheck. It's more important to be able to learn from the mistakes and react quickly to fix them than it is to be 100% perfect all the time. If you are perfect all the time, you will inevitably be put on another fubar'd project to help fix it. If you can't fix a problem, you are less valuable than those who can... even if they create them. Being naive, I didn't realize how true this really was. I truly thought, well screw that, I will just never screw up and I will be golden. Wrong. If I was the only person in my universe, this would work. However, I am not. As I have stated in previous posts, 50% of our population is below average in intelligence, and it's up to the others to pick up the slack. Maintaining yourself is a given, elevating those around you is success. Rolling back to my first design blunder, I am kind of happy I failed the way I did. It was not a big deal long term, the redesign worked great and the design is in production now and doing very well. The lesson I learned from it has made me a better overall person and engineer. This is very engineering specific but I think the same rule falls into place for life in general... within reason, of course.

All of this story fell into place today as my young engineer stood there with parts in his hand, totally miffed that they did not work. All of his dimensions were correct, the shape was how it should be, it just flat out didn't work. As I stood there and saw the frustration and embarrassment in his face I couldn't help but remember how I felt. This time, however, I was on the other side of the coin and had to give the pep talk. It all made a lot of sense at that moment. Being perfect is fine and dandy, however, being able to overcome problems is where the money is at. Unless of course you run a bank... or GM.

Thisisafakename