A topic that often comes up lately is high turnover, especially the perception that this is common and desirable among millennials. Born in the mid eighties, I am right on the cusp between millennial and Generation X, and I am one of the aforementioned employees with a high turnover history. A specialized Reliability Engineer with nearly ten years of work experience, I have rarely stayed with a company much over two years. I never intended to be a person who moved between companies so regularly, it just kind of happened. [Read more…]
How to Shine in any Interview
How to Shine in any Interview — Me at My Best! Stories
It was 7:15 am. We had just finished up our morning kick-off meeting for our lab staff at the generating station, which was about to start-up following a planned outage. Mary, one of the senior lab technicians, came frantically into the lab from the plant.
“We have a problem! The circulating water pH meter is reading a 3.0!” Mary
My heart started racing. [Read more…]
How to Find Your Purpose as an Engineer
Engineers, You’re Doing It Wrong!
When you woke up this morning, how did you feel? Was it giddy excitement for what the day ahead holds? If not, then you are likely not living your purpose. Not pursuing your life’s work.
For me, the idea of pursuing my life’s work became exponentially more important in 2013. Over the past 3 years, I had gotten married (yay!), became a mother to my husband’s 5 year old son (double yay!), had a daughter (triple yay!), lost my mother to 5 year battle with lung cancer (tears! lots and lots of tears!), and become pregnant with a baby boy (due January 2017!). [Read more…]
International Day of Failure
In light of the International Day of Failure, Oct 13th, let’s consider failure from a reliability engineer’s point of view. We work to understand and avoid product failures. When a product fails to deliver the desired performance attribute it is tossed away, returned, replaced, repaired, or tolerated. This may occur before or after the value of the product has been achieved. [Read more…]