burn rubber…not the candle at both ends

We’re entering the final stretch for the semester–less than three weeks left! It leaves me a bit torn, though. On the one hand, I’m counting down the days and can’t wait to be done. I have plans to attend Philly’s annual Science Festival Carnival on May 4, and I have a week free before my internship starts to go visit my mom for Mother’s Day (which I haven’t been able to do since moving out). Then I have a full summer of gaining experience in my field, and more importantly, earning a significant income. It’ll be much more relaxed than attending school, and I’m really looking forward to it.

There is a downside, though. It’s mainly the looming deadlines for group projects and studying for final exams. We’re in crunch time, and everyone is tired and stressed. We’ve been working non-stop since January, with only a few brief breaks during the semester and a slightly longer break over winter. There’s less than three weeks left, but each week is jam-packed with last-minute quizzes and midterms and deadlines for group projects. I wrote before about my concerns for scheduling time for group meetings for these projects; so far I think I’ve been managing…but we’ll see in a couple weeks just how well I’ve been managing.

With all that said, I think it’s understandable that one of my concerns for the tail end of the semester is burnout. When I began writing this blog, I mentioned that last semester I overloaded myself because I thought I had enough time to take on extra classes. It ended with a nearly-spectacular burnout at the end of the semester: I was ill for the last month of classes, I was constantly exhausted, and as a consequence, my work suffered and my grades tanked. I can say with confidence that I’m in a much better place this semester compared to last semester, and I’ve mostly managed to avoid burnout.

How I felt at the end of last semester…and what I am trying to avoid for the future

I read an article on LinkedIn this morning, How to Protect Your Team from Burnout. It was geared towards leaders in the workplace, but the bottom line can be applied to school, too. The subheadings were: “manage the whole human,” “realign your team’s expectations–and your own–through compassionate directness,” and “help your team detach in the evening–and reattach in the morning.” The bottom line of all of these sections was this: the physical and emotional experience of work are just as important as the actual work; an open dialogue around expectations can help relieve stress; it’s important to detach from your work at the end of the day, rather than being engaged 24/7. I will say that school is a good environment for managing expectations, as professors issue syllabi with grading criteria, etc., although the rest of the points were things that could be counted as self-care.

These things aren’t exactly revelations, but it’s easy to forget about them. Speaking personally, I know there’s often temptation to be on for school the whole day. There’s so many things demanding our attention and we have to be sure to meet all of our deadlines, etc, and sometimes we even feel guilt doing something that’s not schoolwork, despite the fact that we need the break. I know I’ve had trouble in the past, but I’ve made an effort this semester to do better.

Here’s a look at things I did differently this semester that I think really benefited me compared to previous semesters:

I took breaks during homework sessions. In particular, when I got stuck on a problem, I stepped away and came back to it later, rather than allowing myself to get frustrated. Recently, I did push too hard trying to do a homework assignment, and wound up only making things more difficult for myself, but when I returned to the assignment later, I had a fresh mind and was able to finish it with much less difficulty than the first attempt.
I started keeping a physical planner, which has made it easier for me to keep track of all of my obligations, assignments, group meetings, etc, which has consequently made time management and prioritizing much easier.
Perhaps most importantly: I have set hard cut-offs for my “work” day. This was a bit more difficult for me to do in previous semesters, where I worked off campus and/or worked more hours. My work day and school day stretched from whenever my classes started to whenever my work day ended, and I did homework when and where I could. This semester, I’m fortunate enough to have on-campus work. Now, I try to get all my school work done before leaving campus, so that when I do leave campus for the day or the weekend, I’m done. It doesn’t always happen that way, but having that mindset has made it easier for me to disengage from school–which I think has improved my productivity and success overall.

Near the start of the semester, I wrote about improving my time management. I can confidently say that I’ve made progress with that goal, and that I’m seeing improvements in my work and mental health because of it. I’m still stressed, but I’m not five minutes away from a breakdown because of burnout like I was last semester. Granted, what works for me might not work for others, but what’s important is to figure it out, either way, for the sake of grades and productivity and mental health.

I’d rather do the burnout that you do after you win a race!

I guess I’m ready for the semester to be over, after all. I’ve got a pretty good handle on things, especially compared to past semesters, and I just have to see them through to the finish line!

If you made it to the end here, I appreciate you sticking with me! Remember to take care of yourselves, if not for your mental health (though personally I think that should be a priority), then for your performance at work/in school. Figure out what works best for you, and run with it!

Don’t stop me now

In my last post, I talked about time management, and how it’s a weakness for me that I’ve been wanting to improve. One of the ways I said I was going to work on this was spreading my homework assignments out through the week, rather than doing them all in one shot (and often, last-minute). It’s not just time-management–it’s a good study habit, to keep the information fresh in my head as I revisit it throughout the week.

I’ve been keeping up with this particular goal for the most part, so far, and it’s paid off, especially this week! As it turns out, I’ve fallen victim to illness, as so often happens when one is surrounded by people. As we all know, it’s much harder to be productive when you’re ill, and it’s much harder to recover from being ill when you’re trying to be productive. Luckily, I already made headway in my assignments for the week, so that by the time I decided I needed to stay home and recuperate, I was more than halfway through the work. It meant I had less time I needed to dedicate to studying, and more time to dedicate to resting and recovering. I’m still not feeling great, but it certainly helped that I had some wiggle room with that. The last thing I have left before the weekend starts is this blog.

Dr. Ferrar gives us optional prompts to use for our blog posts, and while they’re just that–optional–sometimes it’s helpful to have a little direction when working on these things. Otherwise I might go off on some tangent that’s only partly related to fluid mechanics (we would call that a streamline in fluids: a family of curves instantaneously tangent to the velocity vector of a flow). In any case, this week’s prompt is to pick a topic we’ve discussed in class and find a real-world application for it, and how the concepts from class might have influenced its design and function.

Since I’m distracted by how much my nose is stopped up, I thought I’d take a look at dams.

The infamous Hoover Dam (photo from: https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/photos/10-americas-grandest-dams/dam-great )

The Hoover Dam is possibly the most well-known dams in the USA; a veritable feat of engineering. Of course there was so much more to consider in the design of Hoover Dam (and other dams) aside from the most basic fluid mechanics aspects–I’m not a civil engineer but I know enough about concrete to know that the concrete aspect alone was a challenge–but from the fluids side of things, I can better envision the whys of the dam’s design. We’ve been discussing fluid statics and Pascal’s Law recently, and with it all of the force reactions, and while it may seem obvious that pressure–and therefore force reactions–are greater as the depth of a fluid increases, due to the weight of the fluid above it, it may not be so obvious to make the connection between that information and the shape and design of a dam. But it’s there in the dam’s specs!

Aside from the curved shape of the dam that forces the concrete into compression, it is also much wider at the base than at the top: 660 ft at the base, compared to 45 ft at the top, according to Wikipedia. It makes sense, because the pressure and resultant forces near the top of the dam are much less than those at the bottom of the dam.

Of course, the Hoover Dam is just one of so many. As a Wisconsin native, I’ve heard the phrase “The Wisconsin River is the hardest working river in the nation,” so many times over that I can’t pick out any one source, but a quick internet search tells me that there are 26 hydroelectric along its 500-mile-long journey through the state (Wisconsin River Power Company). It’s a subject that makes me want to know more…but perhaps that’s something for another time.

Time is a construct…maybe.

The semester has just started, and like every semester before, I’m trying to stay wary of what’s to come—the semester tends to start out slow, and it can easily lull a student into a false sense of security. You’re coasting along, and the next thing you know, it’s week five and you have deadlines and exams in every class, all at once. On top of that, you have other considerations: it’s going to be Engineers Week before we know it, and the Career Fair is just around the corner!

I’m not sure what my plans are for Engineers Week yet, and I’m lucky enough to already have an internship lined up, but it doesn’t hurt to drop by the Career Fair to work on approaching people to network and build those professional skills. Whenever I have to approach someone in that kind of setting, I try to remember my favorite character from the Princess Bride:

It’s a meme, but that doesn’t make it any less relevant to understanding how to approach potential employers. Or even just connecting to people through LinkedIn! Just remember to be courteous and professional.

But back to where I started: I’m wary of what the semester has in store for me. I know that time management in an academic setting has always been a weakness for me. I’m a returning student, and while I have been back in school long enough to be aware of the expectations and lifestyle that comes with being a student, I still struggle to strike the right balance between school and work and home. I’m hardly the only one with this issue, but there’s a huge difference between simply working and leaving your work at the job when you go home, and being a student, where homework is where most of your work needs to go—and that’s on top of the hours already put in inside the classroom. This year has been particularly challenging for me, because it’s the first year I haven’t worked full time hours during the school year—which may sound like a load off, but I’ve found that it comes with its own set of challenges.

What kind of challenges? As it turns out, I have a bad habit of overestimating how much I’m capable of doing, and as a result, end up overloading myself. It’s less of a problem when my only commitment is to a job, but each class is like a job in itself, and each semester it takes me time to find a new balance. Without having to dedicate as much time to going to work, my first response was, “I can take more classes!” It sounds good in theory, but again, I overestimated, and in my attempt to take on more classes, I ended up shooting myself in the foot.

My goal for this semester (and for all future semesters), therefore, is to work on time management to allow me to strike a balance without overloading myself. It is doubly a personal and a professional goal–if I find that balance personally, I will improve both professionally and academically.

In order to achieve this goal, I want to start by becoming more aware of my current load: what obligations and tasks do I currently have? How much time/energy does each one require? What needs to be prioritized? Does any particular obligation or task give me more trouble than another? Answering these questions will give me a time frame to take care of each obligation or task, and by prioritizing, I can begin tailoring a schedule for my current tasks, based on time, priority, and other considerations.

For example, these blog posts are fairly straightforward and easy, and although they take some time to reflect on and write them, I can do them on my phone while I’m on the bus or the train–one less thing I have to worry about when I sit down to work on homework. Meanwhile, the problem set portion of the homework takes much longer, and requires more concentration–so I should plan to spread out the work over the course of an hour-to-two hour blocks through the week. Etc etc for other tasks, until I have a nice round schedule.

And then, the key thing for me: will taking on another obligation/task be feasible? My instinct at the start of the semester was to say yes, but after a couple weeks of class and reflecting over my time constraints, I have realized the answer is, probably not; at least, not without having adverse effects on the things I already have on my plate.

So, here goes! I’ll work on improving managing my time, and share my results as the semester goes on.