Chris' Engineer Blog

Common interview questions are: “How do you stay organized?”, “Are you experienced with multitasking?”, and “How do you manage your time?”. Within any industry, employers desire highly versatile and efficient workers. An employee who can adapt into any role is valuable, since unexpected issues happen all the time. Managers want to depend on their direct reports to handle these new responsibilities as they occur. Setting an Agenda Students develop multitasking skills during school, since they're usually enrolled in five classes at a time. During middle school, I had a binder for each class but a common agenda notebook. At the end of each class, the teachers would write down on the board the assigned homework for the day. When I got home, I could review the assignments for each class at a single location, rather than having to check every binder. Fast-forward 10 years and I started my first full-time position in my Engineering career. In the beginning, I’d use a notebook to hand-writ...

At about $10,000 tuition per semester, an Engineering degree is worth $80,000. It's a hefty deposit, but it's the mandatory prerequisite for entering the Engineering industry (without prior work experience).  But what happens in the 4-years that transforms a student into an Engineer?  What I learned in Engineering School is... I've leafed through my old notebooks: pages and pages of handwritten notes, equations, and solutions. These notes provide objective evidence I learned this material in my past, even if I can’t recall it at the moment. I remember the late nights of studying, and the emotions (stress, despair, etc.) from completing these arbitrary assignments. Through all my effort, these homework answers wouldn’t achieve anything, since they were just theoretical problems with known solutions. I started my Mechanical Engineering (ME) degree when I was 18 years old. Even then, I wasn’t quite sure what engineers worked on (maybe, engines?). As I went through the undergra...

I used Blogger in early 2018 to document my trip to Asia, but I didn't touch it after that. Some time in June 2019, I got the idea of starting a professional website to share my personal thoughts. I acquired the 'ChrisEngineer.com' domain and created a WordPress-powered website. The hosting service was not free, which I hoped would motivate me to remain diligent in sustaining the content for my own productivity.  I started writing primarily about Engineering concepts I've learned in industry, and how they could be applied in all areas of life. The core of Engineering is problem solving and root cause analysis, which could used to truly understand and improve our life situations.  Later, I started using it to document for my personal projects (recipes, video editing, games, coding). As a hobbyist, I'm not too committed to any one of these pursuits and can freely move between them. However, swapping between them too often can hinder proficiency in a single skill.   On...