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"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

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Tag: UTEP

NCSU and UTEP weigh in on fast food workers and the minimum wage

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On Friday, January 3, 2014

In Work

Day 865 of 1000
Betty Blonde #31 – 08/28/2008
Betty Blonde #31
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Carl Bialik, the Numbers Guy over at the Wall Street Journal has an insightful article on a study about fast food workers and how their low wages impact our taxes. Not surprisingly, the liberal authors of the study from Cal Berkeley and U. Illinois, interpret the data to say that low wages workers cost the taxpayers $7 billion dollars per year in benefits from four major nationwide government programs.  A professor from my Alma Mater points out the obvious:

Thomas Fullerton, an economist at the University of Texas at El Paso, said his “interpretation of this evidence differs from that of the authors.” Fullerton added, “In the absence of jobs in the food service sector, the fiscal burden represented by these workers would be much worse simply because their income levels would be even lower and they would require greater amounts of public assistance in order for their families to survive.”

A professor from NCSU (Kelly’s and Christian’s school) makes the same point.  It is amazing how often academics with an agenda generate some data, then make totally unsupportable conclusions about what the data says.  In this case, it seems very unreasonable to conclude that taking away low wages jobs by raising the minimum wage will somehow cost the taxpayers less.

The BEST statistics class

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On Wednesday, November 13, 2013

In Education, Work

Day 814 of 1000

Quality control browniesMy professor for Statistical Quality Control at the University of Texas at El Paso was Dr. Thomas McLean. He was the head of the department, a classmate of Ross Perot at the Naval Academy, and a great guy. I was there to run the Machine Vision Applications Laboratory which was started by Dr. Carroll Johnson and I, but they talked me into getting a Masters degree in Industrial Engineering at the same time.  I had to take a few undergraduate leveling classes to get started and the SQC class was one of them.

I loved the class.  It was not so much that the material was so complex or innovative, but that I had worked in the manufacturing sector for ten years before I arrived at UTEP and I understood its importance.  SQC is a tool that is frequently used in conjunction with Machine Vision.  Machine Vision has been the main focus of my career, so it was great to take that class with an excellent instructor.  I used what I learned in that class for part of my thesis and frequently ever since.

I told Kelly about the class.  I am sure she was a little skeptical, but she was required to take it as part of her Statistics degree.  She has enjoyed it a lot.  Yesterday, she had to make brownies that were used as part of a project for the class where the quality of a process was measured and evaluated.  What an awesome way to make this material come to life.

Mid-career Masters Degree: El Paso, Texas

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On Wednesday, October 16, 2013

In Education, Work

Day 786 of 1000

This is the fourth in a series of posts about how a mid-career Masters degree changed my life. I admire people who do an after work and weekends Masters degree so they can pay the rent and support the family, but I did not do it that way. I bailed out of my job and dived in full time after having spent ten years in the workforce.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here.

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After ten years in industry, there were lots of good reasons for me to return to college at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) for a Masters Degree.  Primarily, there was a professor there who wanted me to come for a specific reason.  He was not just willing to have me come.  There was a need for someone like me.  That was huge.  I had something to offer the Industrial Engineering program at UTEP because of my ten years of experience that other students who moved directly from their Bachelors degree did not.  I was able to talk to people in the industrial sector around Texas and New Mexico as well as the Maquiladora sector in Ciudad Juarez, and Chihuahua in Mexico.  Those ten years experience that to speak with the industrial base in ways that “fresh-outs” could not.

It turns out that our program was further reaching than even the industrial sector around El Paso.  We ended up providing services and/or installing equipment in Israel, Singapore, and Monterrey, Mexico.  Those services brought money and research opportunities to the University.  The experience I gained representing UTEP in industry was, in some ways, more valuable than the classes I took.  The bigger point is that anyone with ten years experience in the private sector, if they were working hard and paying attention, will have something significant to offer a University that will make the transition back to college much more palatable.

While UTEP is not one of the flagship universities of Texas like Texas A&M or University of Texas at Austin, it is a great regional university.  It had exactly what I needed and it was not only willing to accept me as a student, but had a unique way to use my skills.  When I first got there, I wondered whether I had made a big mistake, but the longer I stayed, the more I liked it.  It was a super match for me and we actually were successful enough in our work that, when I finished my Masters degree, I was invited to Texas A&M to continue on to a PhD.  I never availed myself of that opportunity, but UTEP allowed me to transition from a mediocre (in terms of grades) Bachelors degree to a top tier University in one step.

The bigger point is that finding a slot like this might take some serious investigation and a move to what might at first seem to be an odd place, but it is worth it to find a school that will not only accept you as a student, but has a professor with a desire for someone with your unique skills.  The professor with a desire for your unique skills and a willingness to go to bat for you makes all the difference in the world both with respect to acceptance into a program and life as a student once you get there.

Mid-career Masters Degree: Can you get an Engineering Masters degree with a Bachelors degree in Business?

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On Wednesday, September 25, 2013

In Education

This is the second in a series of posts about how a mid-career Masters degree changed my life. I admire people who do an after work and weekends Masters degree so they can pay the rent and support the family, but I did not do it that way. I bailed out of my job and dived in full time after having spent ten years in the workforce.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here.

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The title of this post in the series was a big impediment to me.  I believed it was not possible to go on to a Masters degree in engineering after earning a Bachelors degree in Business Administration.  I was wrong.  I should have understood this because I actually worked with a lady who went on to a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering after earning a Bachelors degree in English.  She had to take a ton of what Dr. Johnson called leveling classes math and science class during a probationary period, but it took her less time and effort to do that than start over from scratch on a Bachelors degree in Engineering.  I have a friend who had no degree at all and made a dramatic shift from Christian ministry through a Bachelors degree in Civil Engineering, then on to a PhD in Biological and Agricultural Engineering.  I will tell his story in a second post.

“Use what you have and start now” is the advice I would give anyone with a Bachelors degree and wants to get a Masters degree at just about any point in their career.  What do I mean by that?  I have worked and talked with a lot of people in this situation. I believe that almost everyone underestimates their preparedness for moving on to the next academic level.  In my case, it took a series of conversations with Dr. Johnson to convince both that I could handle the academic load and that I was in a place to make a unique contribution to his program that would make my life at UTEP more interesting and rewarding.  He was right about it all.

So the issue is to identify those things that make you desirable to a Masters degree program and present them to the right person in the school you want to attend.  In the end, it is about people–you and them.  I wish someone would have told me this sooner, but maybe I would not have had such a good story to tell any sooner.  At any rate, I had no idea how to go about this until Dr. Johnson and I started talking.  Here is a list of things we used to get me in the program.  It is not long, but it was enough.

  • I had taken the math and most of the science I needed in an Associate and Bachelors degree
  • I spent ten years working in manufacturing facilities selling equipment and technology to solve essentially Industrial Engineering problems
  • I was an experienced C programmer
  • I had written technical articles in trade journals on the use of robots and vision systems in industry

In the end, we were able to set up a program that required me to take 4-5 leveling classes (Operations Research, Statistical Quality Control, and several others).  Dr. Johnson started a new laboratory we called the Machine Vision Applications Laboratory.  He got me a scholarship and found me a way to help him move technology into local (and eventually international) industry.  After that, it was easy to make the decision to move to UTEP.  My buddy, Curt and I drove down to Texas at the end of 1988.

So, first, figure out what you have and how to use it to get into the program you want.  I will tell a story in the next post of a good friend who did a mid-career change that is fairly breathtaking.  He thought he was starting from zero, but found a way to work his way into a truly amazing academic career that started from almost nothing and is about to end with a world class PhD.

Mid-career Masters Degree: Introduction

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On Tuesday, September 24, 2013

In Education

Day 764 of 1000

This is the first in a series of posts about how a mid-career Masters degree changed my life. I admire people who do an after work and weekends Masters degree so they can pay the rent and support the family, but I did not do it that way. I bailed out of my job and dived in full time after having spent ten years in the workforce.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here.

[Next post in series]

Carroll Johnson, Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering, UTEPThe guy in the photo is Dr. Carroll Johnson, my thesis advisor from my Masters degree at the University of Texas at El Paso.  I would like to take credit for figuring out that it would be a good move to get a Masters degree, but the truth is that it happened for a lot of little reasons and at least two big reasons.  I like to think God had has hand in it.  The first reason that I decided to go back to school was that my company, Intelledex, got bought by a much bigger company and wanted me to move from Corvallis to Portland, Oregon.  I was really a small town boy so that did not set well with me, so I started looking around.

The second reason was the big guy in the picture.  He is everything an Industrial Engineering professor should be and even more than that, he was (and is) Texas personified–bigger than life.  If I were to write a series of posts on Dr. Johnson, I would never finish.  Maybe that is why I am writing about a mid-career Masters degree–I hope to finish the series before I die.

I first met Carroll when Intelledex sold him a vision system.  A vision system is a computer with a camera hooked up to it that does things like measure and count things, guide robots, and other stuff that is very useful to Industrial Engineers in factories.  About the time he needed a second vision system, Intelledex was in the process of being bought.  I told Carroll what was going on and he asked me whether I had ever thought about getting a Masters degree.  I told him I had, but I wanted to do something in engineering.  My undergraduate degree was in Business Administration so I did not think it was  possible to do anything in engineering.  He disabused me of that notion and we started a series of communications that culminated in me quitting my job at Intelledex and heading to Texas.

This series is about how all this took place.  I will keep an index of the posts on this page and update it as I go along.  At this writing, I am not sure how many posts it will take, but I am pretty sure it will be more than five.

Rules for a great career (even if it is accidental) Part 1 of 3 – Stay in touch

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On Friday, May 3, 2013

In Business, Education, Milo and Sarah, Money, Technology, Work

Day 620 of 1000

This is the first in a series of three posts about things that have helped me develop and sustain a career I love.  The first post is about how to stay in close touch with people with whom you have worked.  The second post is about how to give away free work whenever you can.  The third is about how to invest significant efforts in helping previous employers, people who can never help you, and “the least of these.”

I have a career that I love.  Beyond my wildest expectation, it gets more enjoyable every year.  It did not start out that way.  There are several simple things I wish someone would have explained to me about career and life that I did not realized until I was in my forties.  This is the first of two posts about the rules I believe got me here.  Of course, the rules are not the only thing–you have to know how to do the job, but the rules set things up for my success.  The first set of rules has to do with staying in touch with colleagues and are listed at the bottom of this post.  The second has to do with giving things away (yes, that means for free) and life-long learning.  First, a little about my background and career path.

Education

Through no fault of my own, I have a great career doing work that interests me with good people.  At some level I have always known it was by the grace of God because I certainly did not plan it that way.  I (barely) finished a degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing in 1978.  I got pretty bad grades and when I got out, surprise, it was really tough to get a job.  I was a microcosm of what happens to people who study non-STEM degrees today with the exception that college was pretty cheap at the time, I was not saddled with a lot of debt, and I (again) got pretty bad grades.

I worked for awhile at nights in the mail room at a large technology company running computer reports around their multi-building campus.  It was truly a dead end job, so I decided to go back to college and get a technical degree.  If I had had a brain in my head, I would have done the leveling classes to get into a Masters degree program.  No really great school would have accepted me because my grades were so bad, but knowing what I know now, it would have been pretty straightforward to get accepted at a good regional University as a probationary student long enough to prove that I could handle the degree.  I already had a lot of the math and chemistry, so it would not have taken long if I worked hard.  Later in life, I actually worked with a woman who did exactly that to get into a Masters program in Mechanical Engineering with an English degree and no math.

Career field

So, I went to a technical college and got a two year associate degree in something called Computer Systems Enginneering Technology.  It was kind of a cross between computer programming and electronics.  With that, I got a really good job at a company named Triad in Silicon Valley training technicians how to work on specialized computers specifically designed for auto parts store.  After I had been there a couple of years, a friend told me about a program where I could pay in-state tuition in Oregon while I went to school for a semester in Guadalajara.  It sounded great, so I headed to Mexico.

I made no job plans before I went to Mexico, so when we got toward the end of the semester, I started to worry because I had no money.  Thankfully, my Mom, Grandma Sarah, was way ahead of me.  She saw a want-ad in the newspaper for a technical writer at a robotics company named Intelledex in Corvallis.  She sent my resume, I went to the interview when I got home, and they gave me the job.  At that time in 1983 there were hardly any industrial robot companies, but one had been started in Corvallis by a group of the engineers and scientists who worked at the Hewlett-Packard ink-jet printer facility.  Within a couple of years, I had moved over from the robots to work on something called machine vision.  A machine vision system is a computer that has a camera connected to it.  The system captures images of things that are happening on conveyor belts and workstation tables to guide robots, check the quality of assembled parts, and that sort of thing.  That is the field in which I have worked for the last thirty years.

I stayed at Intelledex for eight years as a technical writer, trainer, applications engineer, and regional sales manager.  I got to know enough about machine vision that one of our customers, the University of Texas at El Paso, invited me to start and run a vision laboratory to develop machine vision systems for use in factories in Texas, New Mexico, and Northern Mexico.  While I was there, I was able to take the leveling classes I needed to enter and complete a Masters degree program in Industrial Engineering.  We were successful enough that, I actually got invited to lecture to the faculty at the National University of Singapore about the program and some of our systems got deployed as far away as Israel.  After that I got invited to Texas A&M to start a similar program there and to start a PhD.  That program and the PhD never progressed very far because marriage and real life got in the way and lead me back to machine vision with Motorola, another of our old customers in Florida.

What made my career take off

It should have dawned on me that the reason I had the educational opportunity at UTEP and the job opportunity in Florida was because of connections I made in my work with the robot company.  I left Motorola to start a business that was pretty wildly unsuccessful and needed to go back to work.  I really did not know where to go, so I went back to the well and called some of my old Intelledex friends.  They said, of course we will hire you.  That was really a wake-up call.  The people that rehired me were now at a different company, ESI in Portland, that had purchased the machine vision part of Intelledex.  I realized the people I worked with before were not only just workmates, they were friends who valued what I did.  Not only did we enjoy working together, they valued me for the contribution I could make.

The next big event in my awakening was initiated by the dot-com bubble.  I got caught in a mass layoff due to business conditions and I found myself on the street.  That really set me on heels.  I had a mortgage to pay and a family to feed.  I wracked my brain and called everyone I could to find a job.  One of the guys I called was a camera salesman.  He said he knew of a job in, of all places, Corvallis.  I called the guys and guess what?  It was populated with some other of my old compatriots from Intelledex.  By now I start to clue into the fact that I have friends out there.  It really irritated me that no one emphasized the importance of staying in touch with workplace colleagues.  My rules for a great career were an outgrowth of that epiphany.

Right now, the shoe is on the other foot.  Some of my old Intelledex compatriots work for me as contractors.  It is nice to be on the other side of the equation and reinforces the knowledge that a job helps both the employee and the employer.

Rules for a great career

  • When you leave a company (or move from one division to another) make a list of people for whom you have respect.
  • Follow the careers of the people on your list and send them an email or even a card whenever they get promoted or change companies.
  • If someone on your list loses their job, wrack your brain and make some calls to people who might be able to use them.  It helps both the employer and the employee.
  • If a company tries to recruit you and you cannot take the job, actively try to find someone who can feel the need and make follow-up contact to see if they are still looking.
  • Take every opportunity possible (after putting God and family first) to meet with your colleagues and ex-colleagues in informal settings (e.g. Take them to lunch when you are in town).

Final anecdote

I received an email two days ago from what I will just call an unfriendly acquaintance.  He and his wife both work in the same field as I.  He saw I had a connection with a company that might be able to give work to his wife.  He essentially had to swallow his pride and ask me for a favor.  I will derive great joy from introducing his wife to the CEO of a company that very well needs someone like her.  This will help an old friend (the CEO), create a new friend (the wife), and turn an unfriendly acquaintance into a friend.  The CEO is already on my contact list, but the (hopefully) ex-unfriendly acquaintance and his wife will now be on my contact list whether the job works out or not.  I plan to contact all three in the next couple of weeks to see what happens.

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