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Explained: How to Write a Memo
Learn how to write an effective memo with our guide on technical formatting for the workplace, including a discussion of headers, the inverted pyramid body structure, and essential writing tips.
More Than a Profile: LinkedIn Tactics that Get Engineers Connected & Hired
Boost your engineering career with Tony Jewkes! Learn to use LinkedIn as a powerful, keyword-optimized portfolio for discoverability. Tap into your university's influential alumni network to build professional connections and land internships and jobs.
Writing Professional Articles: The Little Things That Count
Boost the impact of your professional writing! Learn how formatting and syntax are critical to capturing attention and reducing reader distractions. Follow style guides, master emphasis (use italics and bold, not underlines), and refine sentence structure for clarity and influence.
Writing Professional Articles: Developing Your Writing
Elevate your professional and academic influence with effective writing. Learn the four pillars of writing — narrative, descriptive, expository, and persuasive — to communicate with clarity and purpose. Discover how strong writing, even in STEM fields, sets you apart by showcasing your competence and personality. This article by Dylan Conover provides practical tips for finding your style, using tasteful adjectives, and proofreading your work for maximum impact.
Clustering in Design Thinking: Making Sense of Empathy Data
Unlock meaningful innovation with design thinking and empathy. Learn how to use clustering to organize raw, human-centered data, uncover hidden insights, and avoid common biases. Discover the history of this powerful technique, from the KJ Method to modern affinity diagramming, and see how it can reframe problems to create truly impactful solutions.
Paperclips, Thanos, and the Perils of Overfitting
Discover the dangers of overfitting in engineering design and everyday life! From "lucky" paperclips and Thanos's flawed logic to Clippy's demise, learn how optimizing too narrowly can lead to unexpected failures. Mark McDonald reveals why robust solutions require simplification and real-world validation, avoiding the perils of over-optimization.
Using Engineering Intuition and Strategic Experimentation to Overcome Technical Challenges
Learn from Dr. David Parsi, a mechanical engineering Ph.D. from Brigham Young University, as he discusses his research on overcoming technical challenges in reconfigurable radio frequency instruments. He emphasizes core engineering principles such as intuition, strategic experimentation, and efficient research methodologies. Dr. Parsi's journey showcases how interdisciplinary training and a problem-solving mindset can lead to significant advancements.
Be a Grass-Roots Leader: A Career Reflection and Invitation by Ken Hardman
Not all leadership is by designated leaders. Learn to demonstrate grassroots leadership throughout your career using good character, integrity, effective communication, and collaborative problem solving.
What your Filenames Reveal About your Design Mindset
From very prominent and obvious choices to the very small and seemingly inconsequential choices, design is everywhere. In this article, learn about what other people may conclude (correct or not) about you and the quality of your work based solely on the way you name your files.
A Woman, An Immigrant, and A Nuclear Engineer: Interview with Guirong Pan
Emelia Sunday was able to tour the Westinghouse nuclear fuel production facility and meet some engineers. She shares select questions from her interview with Guirong Pan, a nuclear engineer, and learned some useful things we should all know.
Is Documentation Valuable to the Design Process?
I visited 21 design firms and asked their designers and engineers what they thought about documentation. This is what I learned.
Becoming a Slow Student
Even though the world is moving fast and perhaps even accelerating, it doesn’t mean we can’t be slow in certain ways. Becoming a slow student may be exactly what we need to do to stay at our peak performance in this fast paced world we live in.
The Power of Designing a Networking Plan
The job search is a lot like a game. The challenge is to figure out the rules of the game and then to come up with a winning strategy.
The Rules of Work
In this article, I share direct quotes from six of Templar’s rules of work. These rules are all centered on one of the book’s ten themes: “Act One Step Ahead”. If you are going to move up in the company you have to practice the “mannerisms, attitudes, and managerial traits of the position above the one you currently hold. If you already look as if you’ve been promoted, chances are you will be.”
How to get the most out of an engineering conference
Attending conferences can be nerve racking and exhausting, but they are also exciting and inspiring. When I started my PhD, I thought I would be able to go to many conferences, but a pandemic had other plans. I found myself only attending one in-person conference during my program. With only one chance at an in person conference, I knew I needed to make the most of it.
Useful Acronyms and Abbreviations in Product Development
Professionals use abbreviations and acronyms all the time in their communication. Come up to speed on over 60 Product Development abbreviations defined in this article.
Eight Tips for Acing Your Internship
I honestly didn’t know what to expect when I started my internship, and I was very nervous, so I wanted to share with you eight tips to help you succeed in your own internship.
Getting a Patent the Hard Way
Good design jobs are fun and smart designers never stay more than 3 years on a program to avoid getting stuck in sustainment, which is fixing minor drawing and manufacturing issues down in the factory. That is of course, unless you are in law school, in which case, low stress sustainment is the way to go.
Three Unexpected Tips for Writing Better Technical Papers
After you have done good technical work such as discovering something new, or developing a new technology, your goal in a technical paper is to share those findings with other people. This is not as easy as it sounds. In this article, I share three tips for refining your technical writing that you won’t find anywhere else, but that I am sure will make your writing more readable and trustworthy.