For quite some time I’ve wanted to visit the Lochsa River area, a scenic drive between Lewiston, Idaho and Missoula, Montana. As part of a loop including other river valleys such as the Salmon and Clearwater, it’s more than could easily be accessed on a weekend. As a result, despite living in Idaho for many years, I’d never gotten around to it. This past fourth of July, I took some time to roam around there.
When I set out to explore a new route, town, country, regions, I like to first construct a mental image. Ask myself: what will the terrain be like? What sorts of small towns will be along this route? How will the fishing be? What draws people to live in that area? How do they get by?
Turns out, pretty well
One point of the visualization is to some extent for simple planning: what will the climate be like, does one bring bug or bear spray, does one need provisions for Sunday morning or is there a little local favorite restaurant that should be visited along the way? Now, people use visualization of their goals in a more profound way as a powerful confidence building and organizing technique, which isn’t primarily the spirit I do it in. But there is yet another reason, and that is to allow one to be (generally) pleasantly surprised by how nature and the locals craft their locale differently from even our carefully constructed preconceptions. Using this visualization then helps one be simultaneously prepared for and then surprised by the experience. I had (mostly) the right stuff packed, found many surprise canyons that were far lusher than envisioned, caught fish greatly in excess of my modest capabilities, met some friendly locals (like the owner of the GTS), and overall had a very enjoyable time.
How is visualization related to a blog about engineering and career arcs? It was on this trip I got to thinking about my nephew, starting school at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 2016, thirty years after I’d started. My summer after high school, I had formed very few preconceptions and gave little thought to what life at the university would be like, what objectives to have, how to deal with the people there, how living on my own would be, and a lot of other aspects that I lacked to will to consider. At the time perhaps it seemed like just a mandatory transition from one grade to another, rather than being seen as a great launch pad to redefine oneself, set out on career paths, learn deeply about topics of interest, and other priceless benefits. Mine was, I confess, not a mature or appreciative approach to such an important venture, and as a result I botched my share of things in the early going.
Most of us turn out ok, but likely all of us can harness, enjoy, and build more in our lives with some deeper premeditation. So I asked myself, how will my relatively unstructured, unplanned approach to the university thirty years ago compare to what my nephew, at the same university, in a potentially similar path, will experience today?
That’s one objective of these writings – to compare and contrast how different tracks of engineering students, at the same institution, decades apart, might experience their careers and ask: what’s changed in studies over those years? What tools are useful or have been discarded? How are expectations different? What enduring principles are still applicable? What’s changing in the world of engineering and the marketplace for engineers? How does one face crossroads like career starts, changes, or retirements, at any age?
Perhaps by engineering megatractors
The intent of these meditations is definitely not to imply to the reader that anything about the career arcs or lives depicted is something they should aspire to, or that any of advice (explicit or implicit) is suitable for them, without appropriate experimentation for the circumstances. Nietzsche stated:
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
N.B.: Pretty sure there are wrong ways.
These writings are in the same spirit. It might well be that it would be best for you to make many of the same head-cradling mistakes that I’ve made, as a means to build character (if not bank accounts). However, if you can harvest a few useful strategies from these readings less painfully, it may be to the good.
Wouldn’t it be exciting to be starting at college today? Perhaps in a lake-lined, prestigious, vibrant atmosphere, where people and ideas come together in walk-able, placid surroundings. Or any other institutions where you can find some things to learn, people to learn from, and refuges to learn in.
Not crossroads per se but I loved the Lakeshore Path
Say we are a new engineering student starting class in a month. How do we visualize:
- Our new physical environment. What sort of physical environment do I want to create as my “base of operations”? How will I manage living and working with people that are more (messy/clean)(extroverted/introverted)(this ethnicity/that ethnicity)(this politics/that politics)? What sort of contributions do I bring to this environment? Which of my personal weaknesses are going to need work?
- So much Freedom! What will I do with it? Am I equipped to handle it?
- Balance: in the world of competing demands for time, energy, and funds, what’s my strategy for managing them?
- Anticipation and Motivation: what I am most looking forward to? What will surprise me? Am I here on my own motivations, or those of others’? Indeed, what are my motivations?
- Learning: how do I discover what I’ll need to learn in this new experience?
It occurs that one could ask a similar set of “how” and “why” questions about your personal visions for entering retirement…perhaps looking into the future is as least as tough for a fiftysomething as they might be for the younger set. I’m not the best at answering questions such as these for myself. But it seems the worse you are at answering them, the more important posing them becomes.
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