Grad School Lessons, Final Take

I feel like there's a tapeworm clinging for dear life to the walls of my small intestine.  It knows that it's lost and that it will soon die.  However, it's trying to inflict as much pain on me as it possibly can in the mean time.  The life-sucking parasite that is ravaging me is not a tapeworm; it's my thesis.  I've basically finished my thesis and I've even defended it, but it's still trying to suck as much life force out of me as it possibly can.  Endless typographical adjustments and the fact that I can't get the -freaking- title on the first page of the text will probably haunt my dreams tonight.

The last grad school lessons post that I made was when I had hardly even begun my research.  Now, there are only a few days of pain left before I can finally rid myself of its parasitic influence.  These are some of the lessons that I've taken away from the last year plus of grad school.

• Academia is a Sick System.  Over the last few decades, many in the western world have fallen, helplessly into the idea that more education is better.  In American primary and secondary education, children are passed along from one grade to another and from one level to another, and occasionally given some accolade or certificate of accomplishment.  They are taught that greater occupational and economic opportunities will be available to them if they simply prove their mettle with more education.  While this is true up to a point, more education is not always more advantageous. Getting a (Philosophy) Doctorate often greatly reduces the variety and number of occupational options for an individual.  With a doctorate, one is often bound to do research at a relatively small number of institutions.  It's like a pair of Palladium handcuffs (like golden handcuffs, but not actually that valuable.)
• It's a trap.  Many prospective academics hearken to the ideal that they'll be able to change the world with their free thinking and applied knowledge.  These unfortunate souls think of academia as an ivory tower in which they can get paid real money to philosophize for a few hours a week and not take life too seriously.  The sad reality is that they are still servants to those who are above them.  The grad student or post-doc bends to the will of his advising professor.  The assistant professor contorts himself into knots to meet the whims of the tenure committee.  The tenured professor conforms to the will of the department head.  The department head does his best to not be a complete puppet to the administration.  And most ironically, they all perform in a dog and pony show to impress the funding agency, so that they can get the money to live their "ideal" lifestyle.  The only difference between industry and academia is that the deadlines are softer.  Speaking of which...
• I Thrive on Deadlines.  Academia is a nebulous space in which deadlines, but are always secondary concerns.  Academics are always busy, in part because there are few, if any intermediate deadlines.  Work gets done in a haphazard and capricious manner with *lots* and *LOTS* of wasted time.  Unlike most academics, I'm an almost obsessive-compulsive planner.  While I don't necessarily plan each of my daily activities, I typically have a very good idea of what I'm going to accomplish on that day, and intermediate deadlines help me to efficiently prioritize that time. The "Here's a huge task, I'll see you in a year" model hasn't been helpful or enjoyable in the least.
• The Ph.D. is Indentured Servitude.  Many people think that Ph.D.s are really smart because they have a lot of education (à la my first point).  However, the reality is that the Ph.D. is much more about tenacity than anything else.  An average Ph.D. takes about 5 years.  Basically anyone who's smart enough to finish a bachelor's degree at a respectable institution could get a Ph.D., it's just a matter of how long it will take.  Devoting years of your life to a Ph.D. is just that: years of your life.  And hey, at the end you get another certificate of achievement! >:-|
• Assistant Professorship is Pure Hades.  In the two years that I've been in grad school I've watched both my advisor and my friend's co-advisor change from bright-eyed, optimistic Ph.D. grads to the jaded cynical professors that we all know and love.  It's not a matter of being more optimistic than previous candidates, it's simply what the system does to you.  If all Master's candidates had to have an assistant professor as their advisor, there would be *significantly* fewer Ph.D.s.
• The Graduate School is the Byzantine Empire.  All the paperwork.  Margin restrictions.  Insanely anal table of contents and listing requirements.  Requiring students to finish ALL degree requirements a month in advance to be eligible to walk at the once-annual commencement ceremony.  Taking 3 months to process a 2-page form and finishing only after consistent badgering.  If you like bureaucracy, you'll love the graduate school administration.
• Also, This.

Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful to the God who created me for the opportunity to receive the excellent education that I've received.  I'm even more grateful for the funding that I've received that has allowed me to minimize my debt and to have enough money to serve a full-time mission.  My degree will have value, particularly as I'm trying to find my first job.  As I found out in 2010, most employers of civil engineers are looking for master's degrees in their candidates.  It's become kind of a de facto requirement, particularly if you're looking for a job doing anything remotely specific.  However, my experience as a master's student has killed all desire that was ever in me to get a Ph.D. and then some.  While I'm sure being a tenured professor has its perks, I'm wholly unwilling to endure the 5+ years of indentured servitude and 6-8 years of pure Hades to do a job that I don't necessarily enjoy that much.  The sick system of academia is right for some people... but I'm not one of them.

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.

• 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.

Overall, this term wasn't too bad.  My first grade has even been posted; I got an A in my advisor's class.  Spring term holds Earth Structures (Seepage and Consolidation), Earth Retention, and Bridge Design, but I'm not going to think about that too much until after Spring break.  

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.

Crazy-complicated model with rigid base.

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.

2011 in Review

In January, I published this post on my blag detailing my hopes and goals for the year 2011.  I'm glad to report that I had a much better 2011 than 2010.  Pretty much every goal or hope that I listed in that post manifested itself.  I didn't find an internship despite the supposed prevalence of geotechnical lab work, but I think I'll make it, somehow.  I also only saw 4 football games in person, but again, I think I'll live.  My 2011 included:

• Receiving funding and enrolling in a master of science program at Oregon State.
• Beginning coursework toward that master's degree.
• Moving to Corvallis, Oregon and living 1,300 miles away from my parents. (Honestly, it's kind of tragic even being back for the holiday break.)
• Acquiring a 2011 Mitsubishi Lancer with 000002 miles on it.
• Turning 23.  This has pretty much been my favorite age so far.
• Being the 1% for Halloween.
• Seeing 4 college football games in person.  
• Seeing BYU play and win in Corvallis.
• Getting a new cell phone.  The old one crapped out maybe a month after that post and my parents got me a new one.  A dumbphone, of course.

With a new year comes new hopes and goals.  Unlike last year, I have a good idea of what my future holds.  I'll be continuing coursework and starting research toward my master's degree.  For 2012, I want to make significant strides in my research, not spend more than two weeks at a time in my parents' house, and see more football games.  In addition to the Oregon State games for the coming year, I'm thinking about heading to Provo for the BYU season opener against Wazzu and/or making a road trip to Boise to see the Cougars take on the Broncos on the Smurf Turf.  I'm thinking that the Mayans just ran out of room on their calendar; 2012 is going to be a good year.

Updatetastic

I'm about a month into grad school at THE Oregon State University, which means that I'm about a third of the way through my first quarter.  It's been pretty great so far.  My three classes in Lab Testing of Soils, Foundations, and Seismic Design have been enjoyable and I've been doing well in all three of them.  The thing that I like best about my classes so far is definitely the sparsity of assignments.  In both Lab Testing and Seismic Design, there are only about 4 or 5 assignments due throughout the quarter.  In Foundations, we have an assignment every week, and as long as they don't take 16 hours (like last week's assignment) it's really not too bad.

Also, as you might be able to ascertain from my post before last, I found some research with Ben Mason, who I think is a really cool guy.  He's also my professor for Lab Testing of Soils.  My thesis is going to be something along the lines of "Numerical Methods for Dynamic Soil-Structure Interaction of Multiple Building Systems."  Yes, it's a mouthful, but that's how most theses are. In English that translates roughly to "How soils in urban areas behave when the buildings on top of them start shaking in an earthquake."  Our goal is to try to get this research published in a technical journal and probably present it at a conference as well.  In the words of Ben himself, at the end I should basically be able to staple these two documents together and submit it as a thesis, we'll see how all of that goes.

I'm not starting this research right away.  In December Ben will give me some literature to review, and we'll actually begin with the research in about April or May of next year.  The research will really begin in earnest during the summer, when we don't have much else going on.

I also just got my own desk in the office for geotechnical engineering grad students. It's pretty awesome.

And my Alma Mater plays my new substitute Alma Mater in football tomorrow.  Just in case you haven't heard, I'll be wearing blue and will be sitting in the BYU fan section.  Prediction:

BYU - 30, Oregon State -21

Foresight

I have a testimony that the Lord knows which path in our lives will lead, ultimately, to the most happiness much more than we know it ourselves.  If we trust in the Lord... and even sometimes when we don't really, he will guide us toward the paths that will lead us to the most prosperity.  There are elements in my life currently that I never could have predicted nor have pieced together that has lead me to a great place, even in the midst of bitter circumstances.

I've pretty much blagged about all the elements of my life before, but have never really put the pieces together until now. 

My consideration of Oregon State University for a master's degree began well over a year ago while I was still under the impression that I would work in industry for a few years to figure out where I wanted to specialize before beginning a master's degree.  Like most of the other schools I began considering, my interest in Oregon State was based on their ranking in US News and World Report.  Though, unlike most other schools, Oregon State seemed to stand out at me as a good idea even though I'd never been to Oregon and had little experience with the university outside the '09 Las Vegas Bowl.  (In retrospect, this was an inspired decision.)

With most of the schools in the rankings, I could find one or more reasons to remove them from consideration based on their graduate assistant policies, grad programs, research, etc.  However, Oregon State, ranked at #41 (in an 8-way tie), managed to stick around.  While other schools lost favor, I couldn't find any reason to not like Oregon State.  The earliest list of potential grad schools I made in this blag was in March of '10, which would have been about the time I started considering Oregon State.

In July of '10, even though I still held out vain hope of finding a job, I decided to take the GRE just in case I wanted to apply to grad school in the fall.  This turned out to be another clearly inspired decision.

As my desires to continue fruitlessly applying and networking for jobs faded, I applied for master's programs at 7 institutions of higher learning.  As I began the process, it was fairly evident that I would have to pick a specialization, ready or not.  I decided that I had been trying to convince myself that I didn't like geotech and that that was really my favorite specialty after all.  Applying for the geotech program was a third inspired decision.

In March and April of '11, I was thinking that I wouldn't receive funding from any of the schools to which I had applied and that I would attend CU-Boulder.  I was wrong on both accounts.  I received funding for the 2011-2012 school year from Oregon State and immediately began the process of matriculating.  The tuition waiver and stipend that I received were the first immense blessing that I received on account of my inspired decisions.

On March 11, 2011, a megathrust subduction earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit the northeast side of Honshu, Japan causing extreme loss of property and life.  A similar subduction fault exists a few miles west of the Oregon and Washington coasts, and the prospect of an almost identical quake hitting western Oregon scared the Benjamins out of the state government.  They will now be providing a significant piece of funding to the one significant civil engineering program in the state, at Oregon State University.  See my previous blag post about this here.

The professor who is spearheading much of this research (who did his undergrad at Georgia Tech) is brand new at the university, since they have been understaffed for the past couple years.  I just talked to him this morning and he said that administration and red tape would need to be taken care of for the next few months and that the research would begin in earnest in the first few months of next year.  To put it bluntly, the timing is perfect.  And since this professor is brand new, he doesn't have many grad students/other minions of his own, allowing me to slip in fairly easily.  Trust me, I'm at least as amazed as you at this point.

In summary, with foresight of a pair of unforeseeable events, the Lord was able to prepare a path for me leading to more happiness than I could have ever procured following my own plan(s).  I've rarely considered myself very keen on hearing and listening to the still, small voice of the Spirit.  However, will even the tertiary ear that I lent Him, the Lord was able to guide me.  And I'm sure that the guidance and blessings are not over.  My time in Oregon has only begun and there is almost certainly more in store were this much came from.