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Podcast Episode

Episode 25 — Spark

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sparkJeff talks with his three new co-hosts about what sparked their interests in engineering.

  • Co-host #1 is Adam, a civil engineer who works for a Department of Transportation in the Upper Midwest.
  • Co-host #2 is Brian, an electrical engineer who has spent a good deal of his career doing hardware design for the aerospace industry.
  • Co-host #3 is Carmen, an electrical engineer in the analog semiconductor business.
  • Adam never had any doubt that he wanted to become an engineer. He fell in love with traffic engineering, so became a civil engineer.
  • Civil engineering seems to be a field with good employment prospects, as the U.S. transportation infrastructure needs a lot of updating.
  • Brian started out in journalism, but found an engineering professor who sparked an enduring interest in embedded systems.
  • Carmen enjoyed enjoyed the robots classes he took in high school, leading him into electrical engineering.
  • Working with an experienced engineer during an internship made Carmen realize he wanted to focus on analog design.
  • Brian and Carmen don’t have any current interest in being managers, although Jeff wonders if that might not change in the future.
  • Software packages are making it easier for non-engineers to perform engineering functions.
  • Jeff recalls that W.L. Gore & Associates, Inc. limits the number of employees in each of its divisions.
  • Jim Williams, author of Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design, has noted that development time remains the same, even though the number of features per device continues to increase.
  • A discussion ensues about the advantages and disadvantages of complexity in engineering design.
  • In his book, The Black Swan, author Nassim Taleb discusses why it is so hard to anticipate what will go wrong with a process or system.
  • Jeff quizzes Adam about intersections, highway design, and asphalt durability.
  • Carmen’s blog is Fake EE Quips, and his twitter handle is @FakeEEQuips.
  • Brian’s twitter handle is @B2theory.
  • Although he hasn’t posted anything in a while, Jeff’s blog is Engineering Revision. He can be found on Twitter as @sheltoneer.

Thanks to Tc Morgan for the photo titled “Ignite the moment…” Podcast theme music provided by Paul Stevenson