Hapi Theme

My happy theme (upps HAPI theme) is about foreign culture. As engineer we expose ourselves to a lot of science and math which is cool and really helpful. But we also discussed that engineering also includes a great deal of team work therefore communication. In our global world, it is important to know more than one language and get exposed to more than one culture.

One thing I will definitely do in this college is to learn a foreign language. I am not sure about which one though. I had German for several years in high school so I can take proficiency test and continue improving my German, but I also think college would be a great place to learn a foreign language. I can improve my German myself by reading books and memorizing words since I have the necessary grammar background but I can’t learn a foreign language on my own. Therefore I will probably try Spanish or Italian next semester and hopefully, if I prove qualified enough, I would love to have a study abroad program. As an international student I am currently studying abroad actually but it never hurts to learn more about other culture.

One of the main components of a country’s culture is its history. History has a funny way of itself. By looking at a country’s historical movements one can usually relate it to the current movements. I want to start by taking a general history course, probably history 100- global history, then go into specifics. Last thing I plan about this theme is to get myself acquainted with the literary work of some cultures. I personally like myths better than boring novels and this college has 2 very interesting myth courses. One is Greek mythology and other is the Asian mythology. I plan to choose one of them and play with my literally skills while working on some foreign material.

Ethics

What would an engineer have to know about ethics? Engineers already know too much which give them the power to create new technology and foreseeing the technological advancements, yet in order to preserve that knowledge ethics come handy. I will talk about engineering as a reflection process. It is an art that grows bit by bit experience by experience. Engineers should not be afraid of making mistakes. They should see it as a lesson given to the future generations. Engineers deal with an ethical issue when they try to hide their mistakes. Whether it is a new product they work on, or a simple lab work. Some people just can’t handle failure. As we discussed in class, some students make up lab values to make their projects seem perfect. It is not just students; companies where lots of engineers are involved hide some errors and produce defective products which can go as far as endangering the consumer’s life.

It is not always the failure we hide; it can sometimes be a successful exploration with contradictory outcomes to the common view. Engineers should not abstain from sharing their conclusions even if it means that some companies will have great loss. Engineering is all about innovation, reaching out for the new that didn’t exist before. Some people who have great benefits from the current technology can oppose engineers who can come up with a less expensive technology that would bring the company’s profit down yet it is not the engineer’s fault. Engineers’ job is to share their findings with other people and make them benefit from the innovation they bring. Engineers should not hide anything, positive or negative, from the society they serve to. 

A Creative Idea

- Building a lightsaber

iEFX benefit system

In this rather simple system, I wanted to show how iEFX helps a student through the different environments they create like the labs, teams and classes. One thing to point out is that although lectures are sometimes boring, we are given the opportunity to use all the skills we have both outside this system but also inside the system so iEFX does a good job by letting us try the skills they taught through part of their own system which are the labs and iteams.

LABELS

Fact: Lydia.com has an entire set of labeling lessons for Autocad software.

Ok so some time ago I was interested in learning a design software and my grandfather, who is a mechanical engineer advised me to start with autocad since it is commonly used and apparently easy to learn. I went to Lydia.com to download some tutorials and there there was “autocad for beginners”, for intermediate users… and there was this set called labeling in Autocad…

Well let me talk about the importance of labeling then.. Have you ever looked at a art product and said what the hell is that??! The answer for most of the time would be simply `art`. I envy the artists for they can do whatever they want and simply explain nothing. It is personal and open to different interpretations. An engineer’s nightmare would be the word “interpretation”. We don’t want our work interpreted, we want it to be fully understood the way we created it. So my point is even if we think we created a masterpiece, it is nothing unless we can tell our audience what really is in that masterpiece.

Couple of word son how we label our stuff: One mistake could be getting too specific with the vocabulary. I support the fact that engineers should pay special attention to the jargon used in their field but that doesn’t mean people should show off with that instead of being nice and simple. Also it is important to know the things to label. An engineer should be able to see the essence of his work and label accordingly and efficiently. Nobody wants to see a paper with too many writings on it. Labels can be really efficient and helpful in understanding a work, but they can cause the exact opposite effect as well.

p.s. it just came to my realization that even this writing has a label. That would be the title of it. Titles seem to be the most commonly used labels,, or are they labels?? I have to think about it.

Communicating, Writing and Presenting in Engineering

So here is a free writing on `Communicating, Writing and Presenting in Engineering`:

One thing I like about engineering lies in its capacity to achieve things other people would call impossible. Engineers can do that not because they are super humans but because they can work as a team and create something magnificent out of the individual work they eventually combine. So the necessity of effective communication between team members is almost obvious.

There is another type of communication which can be as important as the communication between engineers. It is the communication between people who demand solutions from the engineers and the engineers themselves. Engineers work with real life problems that require real life solutions. Those solutions would be very complex. So in order to come up with something complex and effective the engineers should understand the problem thoroughly, making sure that their solution will not only fix part of the problem but all of it. Engineers should never detach themselves from the society by thinking all they need is math and science. They should pay close attention to people around them. They should try to communicate and understand individuals’ expectations from him. After all, engineers shouldn’t forget that they are there to apply science and math skills for the benefit of people around them.

Other very important thing is presentation. Engineers may come up with a solution but they have to present it well because there are situations where engineers won’t be doing the all work. For example a civil engineer may found a way to build very wind or earth quake resistant bridges but he won’t be the one building it. He has to present his solution to construction workers in order to substantiate his theory.

You may realize I didn’t talk about writing yet because I have doubts about the necessity of writing. Thanks to the very advanced graphics and simulation software, engineers can actually show their ideas then to tell them. One thing that would require writing though would be the labeling process of the designs they make. They have to be very careful about the vocabulary they use but other than that I don’t think nowadays engineers need many pieces of writing to illustrate their conclusions.

Networking

As a Turkish student I heard some faculty members who teach here. I am an ECE major so one of the members I wanted to meet was Prof. Erhan Kudeki. There was an ECE mentoring session and I first saw him there. Now that I knew what he looked like, I realized the only thing I had to do was to go talk to him.

I went into the Everitt Lab and found his office. I knocked the door and it was locked. I knocked a couple of times more just in case then a lady opened the door. I told her I wanted to see Prof Kudeki she asked me if I had any appointment I said no then he came up and I introduced myself saying  I am a student from Turkey and I simply wanted to introduce myself.

He was very friendly and invited me to his office. We talked generally about Turkey, Illinois and engineering in Illinois. I asked him about the undergraduate research projects and he mentioned me PURE program. That was very helpful and in fact and information I didn’t receive from anyone else then.

The interesting thing happened 1 week after that. I received an email from Prof Kudeki introducing me the other Turkish students in ECE department. Apparently there was a student who wanted to initiate a Turkish Student Association. If I didn’t introduce myself to Prof Kudeki I wouldn’t hear about that.

This incident proved the importance of networking and taking initiative. I was wondering why those two terms were discussed one after the other in the reading assignment but now I understand that building a network demands initiative. I am happy that the person I contacted helped me expand my network. Now I know more people who would contact me but this also brings responsibility because now those people have expectations from me since they hear my name from Prof Kudeki.

Resume Link

let's hope it works, mostly high school stuff

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/onurgur1/shared/OnurGurResume.pdf

Missing Basics

The missing basics presentations was a very powerful tool that made feel like I am going to be an engineer. It talks about all the complex skills an engineer should posses besides math and science. It is a cool presentation that takes away the feeling that by the end we will all be nerds that know only math and science.  Unfortunately though, there were some missing basics mentioned that were so obviously missing in me as well. So here are those basics and my plan to fix them.

Inability to Decompose

I have a problem with this one because whenever I see a project, I tend to think how impossible it is. When we started our group discussions in iefx teams (mine is ts 1 by the way), people talked about really cool stuff like moving couches, hovercrafts , cars, trains and all that and the first thing that came to me was how difficult those projects would be. To get past this attitude, I plan to think those projects as step by step guides which take time and effort, yet is manageable once the right steps are applied. I plan to involve more in class discussions and help to decompose complicated projects. By doing so I won’t be that intimidated by them and hopefully embrace those projects and motivate myself to work on them.

Inability to Measure

There is this misconception that engineering is about sitting in front of a computer and simply applying math and science information. One part of engineering is that; however, I shouldn’t forget that engineering is about serving the society we live in and therefore we have to go out and explore the environment in which we will do some projects. In order to get better at measuring stuff in my surroundings, I plan to attend engineering clubs that are closely related to the places people live in. One club I think of now is the engineering without borders club which specifically designs projects according the poor surroundings people live in. I believe inability to measure is closely related to inability to observe and analyze.

Inability to Communicate

This is one of the hardest challenges I will be facing throughout my entire time in US. As an engineering student, I have limited language skills anyway but more importantly, as an international student I am not even sure if my English skills will ever match one of a local person. In order to improve my communications skills, I need to take classes that would require analysis and expression of that analysis. As a plan I plan to take a class about Greek Mythology which is a topic I am interested in and also something I can analyze and draw conclusions from.  Communications can not only be improved by English skills. I also need to study hard and have insight on the engineering material we will be discussing. Therefore I plan to take special care in the reading assignments so I can organize my thoughts beforehand and share them in class more conveniently.

As a result I checked the curriculum of electrical engineering and saw that I have 30 hours of electives that I can fill. I plan to fill them with lessons that would help me express myself more clearly because whether it is labeling, modeling or decomposing, engineers will use their mouth to do them in a group project. I wish there would be a special symbol language that engineers would use but there aren’t any so let me get ready for my analysis courses.