The purpose of this blog is to take the first steps on my quest to make engineering more accessible. I am fully aware that I will not change the landscape of engineering over night let alone by myself but, I have studied engineering for the past 18 years and what I have found and experienced is that if a scholar of engineering is not careful they can make themselves become obsolete due to the ever changing landscape of the engineering field and the evolution of the general public. I believe that to truly understand the state of the art of a specific engineering discipline one must search through the top academic journals of that particular field. However, I feel like this can be inaccessible to most at times and it can be quite an inefficient way of learning, especially if one is not use to this way of understanding a technical topic. Therefore, I will explore ways to make new topics in engineering fresh by 1) writing about them in this blog and 2) applying modern marketing techniques to make them more accessible.

I recently read two books that spoke to me to start this journey of writing on the internet. The first one is title “Show Your Work” by Austin Klein. “Show Your Work” dives into the importance and showing your work on the internet in a consistent basis [1]. The main goal is to be open with your audience, embrace your amateurism, and share/give all that you can to people and it will reciprocate back to you. I like this book because it challenges the engineering field in general because we tend to keep to ourselves and we mostly publish in academic journals. However, I can use this blog to make me a better writer by posting my thoughts and most importantly my mistakes and learning in my research on nondestructive evaluation techniques and welding engineering. I believe posting my mistakes/learning is most important but may not be seen as valuable to the more respected academic journals, which I understand because at the end of they day these journals have to be profitable and relevant in a result-driven, “5-second” world [2].

The second book I read was titled “One million followers” by Brendan Kane. “One Million Followers” goes into a systematic way for people to create solid following across different social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.). The main focus is to provide people with value before you begin to truly engage them with business transactions. This book is particularly important because as engineers, we do not dive into the importance of be show-people and marketing. I believe we can use these concepts by Brendan Kane to connect newer products and technologies directly to consumers. The tech industry has done this very well and you can tell just by the amount of people they provide services to, profits, and the line of students signing up to major in tech related fields (e.g., computer science, electrical engineering, etc.). My goal is to use this blog to make my research focus of nondestructive evaluation and welding engineering more accessible through interesting books and media I consume.

I hope you found this post valuable. Thank you for your time!

–DB PhD

References:

  1. A. Kleon, Show Your Work! : 10 Ways To Share Your Creativity And Get Discovered. New York, Ny: Workman Publishing Company, 2014.
  2. Brendan Michael Kane, One million followers : how I built a massive social following in 30 days : growth hacks for your business, your message, and your brand from the world’s greatest minds. Dallas, Tx: Benbella Books, Inc, 2020.