- Sometimes you have to throw out style points and just grind through it. Because I've already blagged twice about structural dynamics, I won't go into too much detail. Suffice it to say that it wasn't pretty, but I managed to get through it by little more than pure tenacity. And I'd even say that I learned a thing or two in the process.
- Only trust people to do your work as far as you can throw them. This term, I had one class for which the homework was too be done in pairs. My partner was a not-too-bright structural major (see previous post) who was in his last term and had already mostly moved to Portland. Needless to say, I didn't trust him too much with the workload. I let him spin his wheels on certain parts of the assignments, but in the end, I fixed everything that he did wrong and made sure that it was all up to my standards before turning it in.
- You'll probably adjust to your surroundings, eventually. I already felt pretty comfortable at Oregon State when I walked through the doors, but it still took some adjustment from life at home and at BYU. After six months, Corvallis pretty much feels like home (minus the spatially convenient Wal-Mart) and I've even gotten used to smell of coffee that penetrates the entire OSU campus.
- Sometimes, self motivation is hard to find. Before I started grad school, I read most of the archive of Ph.D. comics and chronicled the pronounced theme of procrastination and not working all that urgently on research. When you've got over a year (or several if you're a Ph.D. candidate,) to complete your research, there's a tendency in most people to put it off and read the College Football Nation blog on ESPN instead. I'll finish the rest of this point later...
- Calling in sick isn't always an option. I was sick for like the last quarter of this quarter (a sixteenth, if you will). It wasn't anything out of the ordinary; just a common cold and/or upper respiratory infection. However, it was quite miserable. My throat burned and I was tired all the time as my immune system tried valiantly to stave off the illness. Then it somehow managed to skip right past my sinuses and go straight to my ears, causing swelling and mucus buildup that left me all but deaf for the last 2 weeks. In a 10-week quarter, it's not possible to just take a week or two off. I just had to suck it up, take lots of cough syrup, and ask people to speak up so that I could hear them.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Grad School Lessons, Take 2
As I finish up the winter quarter at Oregon State University, I've been able to pause an look back on the things that I've learned over the last 3 months.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Straining at a Gnat
Near the beginning of my undergraduate soil mechanics class, the instructor taught us the mnemonic device "Structural Engineers are Weird Guys" to help us remember the equation S*e = w*Gs. It was hilarious and it will help me to remember that equation until my dying day. (It was also ironic, considering that this guy was like the alpha nerd, but that's a story for another day.) In my experience with structural engineers, there is a very bimodal distribution of capability in engineering among them. They're all either really bright and capable engineers, or quite engineering challenged. There are almost no average engineers (so to speak) in the mix.
Yesterday, I felt like I got to experience both ends of this distribution simultaneously. In my structural dynamics class, the professor showed us the computer model of a 12-story reinforced concrete building in Berkeley, California that he had been working on for several months. He had gone to great ends to carefully model all of the columns, slabs, and shear walls in this building. He built a 3-dimensional computer model that had thousands, if not tens of thousands, of lines of code to carefully track all of the components of the response of this fairly complex building to an earthquake that actually happened in the area in 1989. On an ordinary personal computer, the analysis of the response of this structure to maybe 20 seconds of earthquake motion took the better part of a month to complete. The instructor of my class then wrote probably another couple thousand lines of code to make a graphical presentation of the numbers he was coming up with. This presentation was slick, too. He had a model of the skeletal structure of the building in both 2D and 3D moving according to the model outputs along with graphs of the accelerations, displacement, forces, and moments in the building all varying simultaneously as the model time progressed. I've included a low-quality (i.e. one that won't have the sponsors of this research seeking out my name to put on the cease and desist order) picture of this graphical representation. It took not only a good bit of intelligent thought, but quite a bit of dedication to make this high-quality of model.
So what's wrong with it that I say it's both smart and dumb at the same time? Like many other analyses that structural engineers perform, the instructor of my class used a rigid base on this model. Basically, he assumed that the soil on which the structure sits is much stiffer than the materials used in the building. Indeed, he assumed that something commonly referred to as "Bay Mud" is significantly stiffer than concrete and steel. I'd think this next part would be pretty intuitive, but I'll spell it out anyway: that's a terrible assumption.
Yes, I am a geotechnical engineer, and, like most geotechnical engineers, I think that the soil on which a structure sits deserves much more attention than it often gets. And yes, soil-structure interaction is the topic of my research and I am a little biased in that sense, but hear me out.
I know that the effects of the soil that supports a structure can often be neglected for simple structures that are subjected to simple loading. Under these conditions, the effects of soil-structure interaction don't warrant an in-depth geotechnical analysis for the design of the structural members. (There should still be some investigation for shear strength and settlement, but not necessarily for structural design.) However, a 12-story reinforced concrete building is not a simple structure, neither is earthquake loading a simple load case. I really can't justify, in my mind, spending months to build an enormously complicated model that doesn't reflect reality as much as is reasonable because I've omitted a key factor that clearly affects the reality of the situation. If I'm going to go to all the trouble of building a crazy-complicated structural model, I would at least try to model some flexibility in the soil. It would make the analysis much more reflective of reality and would probably only add a few hours to an analysis that's already going to take several weeks to run anyway.
I respect structural engineers. I think that the work they do in practice and in academia is just as important as the work that other engineers, including geotechnical engineers, to society. However, they, like other engineers, often make very complicated, precise analyses for structural members while, at the same time, minimizing or totally ignoring important constraints and boundary conditions. I think it's important for all engineers to take a step back occasionally and look at the entire scope of the system they're designing instead of focusing so intently on the one specialized concept to which they are assigned to attend. This way, we, as engineers, can avoid straining (pun intended) at a gnat and swallowing a camel in our designs.
Yesterday, I felt like I got to experience both ends of this distribution simultaneously. In my structural dynamics class, the professor showed us the computer model of a 12-story reinforced concrete building in Berkeley, California that he had been working on for several months. He had gone to great ends to carefully model all of the columns, slabs, and shear walls in this building. He built a 3-dimensional computer model that had thousands, if not tens of thousands, of lines of code to carefully track all of the components of the response of this fairly complex building to an earthquake that actually happened in the area in 1989. On an ordinary personal computer, the analysis of the response of this structure to maybe 20 seconds of earthquake motion took the better part of a month to complete. The instructor of my class then wrote probably another couple thousand lines of code to make a graphical presentation of the numbers he was coming up with. This presentation was slick, too. He had a model of the skeletal structure of the building in both 2D and 3D moving according to the model outputs along with graphs of the accelerations, displacement, forces, and moments in the building all varying simultaneously as the model time progressed. I've included a low-quality (i.e. one that won't have the sponsors of this research seeking out my name to put on the cease and desist order) picture of this graphical representation. It took not only a good bit of intelligent thought, but quite a bit of dedication to make this high-quality of model.
 |
| Crazy-complicated model with rigid base. |
Yes, I am a geotechnical engineer, and, like most geotechnical engineers, I think that the soil on which a structure sits deserves much more attention than it often gets. And yes, soil-structure interaction is the topic of my research and I am a little biased in that sense, but hear me out.
I know that the effects of the soil that supports a structure can often be neglected for simple structures that are subjected to simple loading. Under these conditions, the effects of soil-structure interaction don't warrant an in-depth geotechnical analysis for the design of the structural members. (There should still be some investigation for shear strength and settlement, but not necessarily for structural design.) However, a 12-story reinforced concrete building is not a simple structure, neither is earthquake loading a simple load case. I really can't justify, in my mind, spending months to build an enormously complicated model that doesn't reflect reality as much as is reasonable because I've omitted a key factor that clearly affects the reality of the situation. If I'm going to go to all the trouble of building a crazy-complicated structural model, I would at least try to model some flexibility in the soil. It would make the analysis much more reflective of reality and would probably only add a few hours to an analysis that's already going to take several weeks to run anyway.
I respect structural engineers. I think that the work they do in practice and in academia is just as important as the work that other engineers, including geotechnical engineers, to society. However, they, like other engineers, often make very complicated, precise analyses for structural members while, at the same time, minimizing or totally ignoring important constraints and boundary conditions. I think it's important for all engineers to take a step back occasionally and look at the entire scope of the system they're designing instead of focusing so intently on the one specialized concept to which they are assigned to attend. This way, we, as engineers, can avoid straining (pun intended) at a gnat and swallowing a camel in our designs.
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