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.

A Dynamic Relationship

This term in school, I'm taking a class that has challenged me more than any academic pursuit has in while.  This class is called structural dynamics.

At its core, structural dynamics is simple: it's merely the analysis of structures like buildings and bridges as they move.  However, the devil is in the details.  Even to analyze the response of a structure to a well-behaved loading pattern is fairly complex.  This endeavor involves use of 2nd order differential equations to solve an equation of force equilibrium called the 'equation of motion.'

Earthquake motions are not well-behaved like a sine wave or an impulse.  These involve complex motion with many cusps and various frequencies of vibration.  What it comes down to is that, in order to make even a remotely reasonable approximation of a structure's response to earthquake loading, an engineer must use some sort of mathematical computer program and an approximate numerical model.

Up to this point, the advanced math and numerical models themselves haven't been what's made the class challenging.  It has been laborious trying to remember material that I studied 3 years ago (and never learned that well to being with), but this hasn't been the worst part.  The thing that has made this class challenging is that, even though the equations used are based on physical principles, it's difficult to visualize how changes in one particular parameter will affect the model of the actual, physical structure.  Engineers as a whole, and especially civil engineers, like to be able to visualize what they're working with.  A good civil engineer will be able to conjure a mental picture of an entire physical system, all of its component parts, and how physical changes will modify the system and its components.  This is often very difficult if not outright impossible to do with many of the principles of structural dynamics because they are based on advanced mathematics.

This is also why mathematical proofs and coding were a challenge for me during my undergrad and so far in grad school.  With mathematical proofs, it's also difficult to find motivation, because honestly, who cares?  Coding, on the other hand, is an integral part of life for anyone who doesn't aspire to a career that involves french fries and/or garbage.  Both of these fields are quite ethereal and don't necessarily have any convenient visual representation for many problems.  I've developed some simple visual representations for principles of coding like if statements and loops, but I still find them challenging.  I will never be a l337 coder as much as I will be a good civil engineer, just because coding is, at least somewhat, inherently unvisualizable.

I should also mention that my professor in structural dynamics is new (like received his Ph.D. in December new) this term and is still trying to feel out the landscape.  The homework assignments have been long and the exam was difficult to decipher.  The professor is a good teacher, but he just doesn't have a good idea yet of how much time is takes students to finish assignments when they're new to the concepts.  I think he'll get it, but he's not quite there yet.  Though, he has assured us that we will get at least Bs if we give the appropriate effort, so I think I'm going to make it.  : )

The moral of the story?  Knowing how you learn and how you reason through concepts is important if you want to optimize your learning and become more knowledgeable with minimal effort.  I learn and reason through things by visualizing them.  Things that are difficult to visualize will take slightly more effort to grasp, and I'm planning on being prepared when they come around.

Being Under-appreciated

A little less than two weeks ago, the BYU Cougars took on the Golden Hurricane of the University of Tulsa in the 2011 Armed Forces Bowl.  The game was a hard-fought slugfest between two equally-matched opponents.  Near the end of the game, BYU drove down the field and scored a touchdown on a fake spike, Dan Marino style to win the game.

The official MVP as well as the Player of the Game awarded by ESPN went to wide receiver Cody Hoffman, who caught all 3 touchdown passes for BYU in the game.  Though Hoffman's performance was impressive, I wouldn't have given him the MVP.  The commentators for the game suggested that they might vote for Matt Reynolds for MVP after an impressive block that he made late in the first half to set up Hoffman's first touchdown pass.  While I think that offensive lineman are among the most underrated and under-appreciated players on the gridiron, I still would have given the MVP to another player for his outstanding performance.

That man's name is Riley Stephenson.  He wears number 99 and punts for BYU.  Yes, I would have given the game MVP to the punter. (As a side note, that's a sharp-looking suit.)

Punting is probably the most underrated and under-appreciated position in football (with the possible exception of long-snapping, though it's pretty much the same idea).  No one likes to punt.  Teams would much rather keep their offense on the field and continue trying to score.  In leagues with less maturity and less defense, punting is rare and teams almost always elect to go for it on 4th down.  However, punting is also key to the game of gridiron football.  Especially when a team is in its own territory, punting puts more distance between the opposing team and their end zone.  If a coach has any faith in his defense, he will usually elect to punt the ball away when his team is on its own side of the 50.  If he doesn't have any faith in his defense, it's going to be a long game, either way.  Coaches will tell you that field position is important in any football game.  It is universally better to start at your own 45 than at your own 5 yard line.  The closer a team is backed up to its own goal line, the more conservative play calling usually is.  On complicated plays, it's too easy to get tackled for a loss and give up a safety or cough up the ball for an easy touchdown.  Winning the field position battle helps a team win the game.

In the 2011 Armed Forces Bowl, Riley Stephenson had an exceptional game punting the football.  BYU sent him out onto the field to punt 8 times throughout the game.  Of those 8 kicks, none were brought out to the 20 on a touchback, 7 of them landed inside the Tulsa 20 yard line, and 3 made their way inside their 10 yard line.  Riley only had one non-amazing kick all game: a 36-yarder that went out of bounds at the Tulsa 42 yard line.  Even that kick didn't look all that bad.

The biggest risk in punting is that the punt returner will be able to make a play and carry the ball for a large gain or even a touchdown.  However, a punt is not really returnable if it hangs up in the air long enough for the coverage team to get down the field and get in the face of the returner or if it goes out of bounds before it can be fielded.  This is the part of Riley Stephenson's punting game that impressed me the most in the Armed Forces Bowl.  Of his 8 punts, 7 were not returned and either went out of bounds or were downed by the BYU punt coverage team.  The one that was returned was a poor decision by the return man inasmuch as he only made it 1 yard before being hit by a BYU defender and fumbling the ball.  This fumble was recovered by BYU and led to the Cougars' only touchdown in the first half.

I relate to Riley Stephenson and punters in general because I'm a civil engineer.  If you live in something that's not a naturally-occurring cave, you're the beneficiary of the work of multiple civil engineers all at once and you probably never recognized it.  Civil engineers design structures like buildings and bridges so that they don't fall down and kill you.  They design the drinking water and sewer systems that keep you from contracting dysentery.  They design roads and traffic signals to be as stupid-proof as possible to try to keep idiots from running into and killing you on the roadways.  They (hopefully) even analyze the dirt underneath a structure so that it doesn't get reclaimed by its mother Earth.  And you know who gets credit for all of it?  The architect (and maybe a little bit the construction crew... maybe).  Yes, the nancy with an art degree who does nothing but make the building look pretty gets all the credit.

So, thank you Riley Stephenson, for your MVP-worthy punting performance and helping the BYU Cougars to a 3rd consecutive bowl victory.  Few others seem to appreciate it, but I know I do, because I'm in the same boat.

I Demand a Manual Recount of Your Blessings

You know those corny things where people make a list of their blessings on their blag?  Yeah, this is one of those things.  I took the title from my recollection of a Jay Leno joke from the 2000 US Presidential Election:

"George W. Bush sits down with his family to Thanksgiving dinner.  They sit around the table and start counting their blessings.  Then, all of the sudden, Al Gore breaks down the door with his lawyers at his back, pounds his fist down on the table and says..."

...wait for it...

"'I demand a manual recount of your blessings!'"

I thought it was pretty clever.

So, today I was thinking about how I've seemed to be so much luckier than my dad in most things in my life so far.  Then I started thinking about how I'm a pretty lucky guy in general.  That led me to think that, as a man who esteems himself to be a Christian, I shouldn't consider myself lucky as much as I should consider myself blessed (though you can't totally discount pure happenstance).  So, here we go:

• I left my car unattended for three weeks and the only difference in it compared to when I left was a spider web that had been spun on the passenger-side mirror.
• I have a car that's paid for in its entirety and is warrantied bumper-to-bumper for the next 4 years.
• Today, I traveled over 1300 miles in under 12 hours for less than $250.
• Oregon State University pays me $1700 a month (before taxes) to get a master's degree and occasionally grade a few assignments.
• Speaking of Al Gore, I have a blazing-fast internet connection that gives me access to endless concourses of information, both of a factual and social nature.
• Though it may appear to be in decline, I live in a point on the time-space continuum that's among the most prosperous in human history.
• I have a bachelor's degree from a highly-respected institution of higher education.
• My parents cared enough about me to teach me many of the important skills to a prosperous life in this world.
• I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and I have a testimony of the Gospel of Christ.
• I'm pretty smart, but sufficiently humble that I can recognize when people are smarter and/or more knowledgeable than me. (barely)
• Today, I wore a pair of 95-dollar shoes that were made by small children in a sweatshop in China.
• There are still single women who flirt with me every now and then.
• Duct tape.
• Knowledge that God did not abandon us to find our own way and let nature take its course, but continues to reveal the right way through prophets.
• BYU football just wrapped up another 10-win season.
• Despite its flaws and the raging viral infection currently wrecking havoc on my upper respiratory system, my body works pretty well, for the most part.
• I have really good hand-eye coordination.  That's why they call me The Hands.
• There are pills you can take that mostly negate the effects of a lack of vegetables in your diet.
• Antiseptic mouthwash does wonders.
• I've had the opportunity to learn another language (mostly) and have been able to keep it bouncing around in my head with relatively little outside practice.
• I can read and write in both languages that I speak.
• There's a postal system that will take some crap that you wrote and, for 42 cents, send it to some random dude in Wyoming within 3 days.  (Thank you Jon Stewart)
• People who have come before me have refined the body of knowledge on clay and stone and steel so that I could understand what I do now.
• Someone thought up glasses for vision correction and someone else thought up sunglasses for light dimming.
• I have a telephone that fits in my pocket.
• I have a calculator that also fits in my pocket (kind of) that does calculus and matrix algebra, graphs functions in 2- and 3-space, and adds.
• Drafting erasers for when I royally screw up engineering calculations.
• An outright unhealthy abundance of food.
• Clean drinking water that's piped to a tap in your house, essentially for free.
• A Savior who lived a life that was beyond reproach from God, suffered incomprehensible pain, and died so that I and 15 billion of my closest friends and family can by happy for the rest of eternity.
• And, undoubtedly, many more.

The Problem

Based on whatever knowledge you have of my life, you might have already formulated some ideas on why it lacks romance and/or spousage.  Based solely on what you read in this blag, you can justifiably come to the conclusion that I have a few emotional issues.  However, the more distance I put between myself and my mother, both temporally and spatially, the less of a problem this really is.  You might also come to the conclusion that I'm somewhat passive around women.  This is also much less true than it used to be.  At age 16, I wanted nothing to do with girls and they pretty much reciprocated that desire.  However, at 23, I'm much more comfortable around women than I've been before.  I've also come to the conclusion that I'm less approachable to women because of my size (~6'2" and 250 lbs) and the Native American blood that gives me something of a disapproving scowl on my face even when I'm not unhappy.  You could also think that I might have trouble finding a woman who's as smart as me, who gets my sense of humor, etc.  The list goes on and on.

I do not consider any of these 'typical' issues to be the biggest problem between me and women.  This biggest problem is that both they and I move.  In the last five years, between Denver, Provo, and Corvallis, I've probably moved 7 times.  Some of those were very temporary, but there has been large uncertainty about exactly where I would be in the not-so-distant future.

For the sake of completeness, let's first discuss long-distance relationships: they don't work.

Now moving on, from about February of '10 to September of '10, I met 3 women that I could have definitely seen myself marrying.  Two of these were in Provo before I graduated and one was in Denver after I moved back in with parents.  In all three cases, I had no idea where I was going to be living a year from the date I met them.

In the case of both the women in Provo, I was getting ready to close out my time as an undergrad student and didn't really know what I was going to do afterward.  During this time, I just wasn't concerned with women because I had more pressing issues like how I was going to eat in 6 months' time.  I still held the delusion that I was going to find a job somewhere in industry, which wasn't the case.  In addition, asking a women whom you only met 3 months ago to move with you is asking a lot, even when you're 100% certain about the location.  When you have no idea where you're planning on moving, it's just downright socially unacceptable. 

In the case of the third woman, I was still totally uncertain about where I was going to be in a year's time.  I had not yet started applying for grad schools, though it was apparent that that would at least be a backup plan.  I was still not particularly concerned with women until about April of '11 for the same reasons as before I graduated from college.  By the time my future became secure enough to feel comfortable dating again, I knew that I was going to be moving to Oregon in the fall and didn't really feel the need to ask any woman to move with me.

A component of these conundra is the fact that, in 2012, women can easily lead their own lives.  In 1952, it was likely that many women were basically just waiting around for a husband.  In 1972, there was still a statistically significant chance that a woman (especially a Mormon) would not be doing much in preparation for marriage.  In 2012, more women go to college than men.  (This is largely a racial issue, but that's a post for another day.)  Women have plans for their lives like work, school, or a mission that they don't necessarily want to drop just to follow a potential spouse around.  This is another reason that it's harder to get married now than when your bishop got married.

As I move forward, I have the better part of a year and a half in Oregon before my future will, again, become uncertain.  If I find a woman who I want to marry, I have enough time to court her an build a relationship.  The prospects don't necessarily look all that bright at the moment, though I hold out hope.

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.