Hey, the engineering work I can (and like to) do.

Interacting with girls once the ice has been broken is fine.

Right now I am frustrated that I can't put myself in a position to talk to my firend and the girl I like more often. It is not giving me hope the way they put off the weekend meet/activity. I am thinking of resorting to asking to study with them or whatever it is that they claimed was more important to do this weekend.

I just don't like going out with no particular place to go. I can drive to the beach I guess and then look around, might not find anything. Or I can go for a hike, and not meet anyone who wants to stop and talk more. If I go for the hike I at least have a pleasant activity to do. But when I get back to my room I may see girls walking out to their cars and I think about going somewhere that I could meet girls but then I don't really know where to go. I don't like bars.

I also don't mean where as in "the beach". I mean where like "how do I get there? Address, landmarks, streets, something to go by. Downtown is tricky with all the one way streets and limited parking as well.

You have received plenty of mentoring. You have locked yourself into a very limited number of possibilities (no, I am not talking about bars). You think you like engineering, but in the real world, design / analysis is not as big a portion of the job as you might think. You will have to do things that are not enjoyable, or that fall way outside your comfort zone. Looking at you from the eyes of an engineering manager, which is my day job, I am not enthusiastic about the excuse making, stubborn single-mindedness, and a lack of appetite for risk. I hope you take this as constructive criticism, as it is intended.

Appetite for risk does not sound like something an employer would be looking for. I like to dream up stuff that does not follow convention but I am going to have a hell of a time defending my suspension design for the FSAE car. Which is why I will need to both take a careful evaluation of the design and see whether it is worth doing and also CMA by making something more conventional in case I either cannot defend the unconventional design sufficiently or if I find a major flaw in the concept behind it.

I do things that are not enjoyable in engineering. Staying up late working on lab reports. Re-arranging my schedule to suit a team meeting. Those are clearly-defined tasks. Even tasks with more general definitions are not bad because I have the undergrad tools for designing and I have a sense for what the goals are.

Of course employers do. Not foolhardy risk-taking, but innovation is essentially risk-taking.

Well I hate following conventional design. It does have its place- often in the case of simple parts conventional design is the best compromise for cost and performance, even if there is a better performance option out there. But I like to dream up new things when it comes to engineering.

There are two sides to my personality just as there are two sides to my approach to risk.

My message has been sent, and if it's not received, it's due to the vagaries of chance, or more precisely, probability.

OK, give me the address of where to go where I would have a chance of meeting girls. That way I can mapquest it and figure out how to get there and not waste time driving around with no destination.

Or am I supposed to just wander around with a chance I will find a gathering of young people where there is a chance there would be a single girl there with the chance that she would be interested in having a meaningful conversation.

spot on, Jim. Max, it's pretty ballsy when an established engineering manager is giving you advice about how bad excuses are, and you're still trying to make an excuse. you're talking like nobody understands you, that you're on a level above the people here. guess what? we've all been there. that's the beauty of listening to (and REALLY listening to) sage advice from some of the elders here. in your impetuous youth, you have blinders on. don't take it the wrong way....i did when i was in college too. we all did.

address:

Robert E. Kennedy Library
California Polytechnic University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407

He only sees one side of me. The venting my feelings side. I never really put much value on emotions. I think that was a good decision. I'll go back now to either coding the hygrothermal corrections for the laminated plate MATLAB code or finding the closed loop transfer function for the controls lab this week and plotting the root locus.

I don't think I expressed my thoughts properly in that first post.

OK, I will go down to the library tomorrow. Somehow I feel that there will not be many girls in the library on a Sunday afternoon but hey, if they are there then they are probably my type.

perhaps it's not your intent, but you're really coming off on this thread with a certain arrogance. it kind of mimics a lot of Schumi's posts. that's what sucks about trying to talk about an emotional subject via a completely impersonal medium.

we all understand you're an engineer. we all understand that engineers have a hard time with communication skills sometimes.

one of my buddy's from college is an engineer....he can read an entire book, tell you every word in the book, but can't tell you what the book is about.

about 500 posts ago, i mentioned Carl Sagan. have you ever watched Cosmos? or seen youtube videos of him online? he had a good ability of being extremely intelligent, but also extremely personable. He was an excellent public speaker. He was great with explaining complex topics to the average guy. he didn't ever come off with a superiority complex. do you see what im getting at?

sunday might be a GREAT time. people cramming after a weekend of monkeying around.

Picked up a new phone a Razor Maxx. Not bad been a little fun getting everything back up and running but I think its done.

Good evening folks. I am tired. I got the yard mowed and one of the sprinkler heads dug up and fixed. The stuff under the grass in my yard is not dirt, it is pure clay. It is perfect for making bricks but it sucks to dig up. Every scoop of the shovel needs another tool to scrape the shovel and the a tool to scrape off the scraper. It is sticky gumbo red clay.

when i was in OKC for training last year, i couldnt get over the red soil. my bimmer had a red sheen when i rolled into california.

Well Glen... There is a HuGE brick plant about 2 miles from your house...

I'm doing some stargazing tonight on my last night in SoCal (this trip). Instead of telling young Max precisely every step he needs to take along the way, I will tend to my right ascension. Nighty night all.