Look beyond the periphery

A few days back I meet a guy who is doing some fortran work in a govt agency as contract engineer!

It seems he has been doing this task as a contract engineer there for 6 months. His task is to develop the tool being created there. He took the task from a previous guy and is now the owner of that task.

He proudly mentions this job in his resume, but when I talked to him and asked him about his task and especially about fortran, he was blank.

He is coding in fortran but he knows next to nothing about it. He knows how to change and use do loops and if statements but nothing else.

He is blank when you ask him about common, shakes his head when you ask about column major and row major.

This i think is the problem that most of the folks doing training and first time jobber have. They don't learn the periphery of their jobs. They do there assigned tasks and leave it there.

Learning more and getting better at what they are already doing never enters their mind. Most concentrate on doing something else apart of getting better knowledge on what they are already doing.

So if you are in the similar stage, please please concentrate on the work you are doing. Master it, learn from it. The grass always looks greener on the other side, but do remember it's your side that will count.

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Supporting structures

They are building an over-bridge on the road next to our area. Construction had began a few months back.

The actual work is going on now, but the pre work, securing the place, creating by pass roads, erecting supporting structures have began way back at the start of the year.

Now the slabs and the cement work is in full swing and I am sure they will finish the work by the scheduled time.

Why don't we apply the same technique for completing our resolutions and goals?

At the start of the year we decide some resolutions like to get fit and we start. And loose the steam just a week or month later.

Why not create supporting structures like the people in construction industry do?

Why not erect our own bamboos just the way it's done for building homes, before the actual work begins.

A little pre preparation on your goals ( resolutions) can go a long way.

If your resolution is to study more, make plan to fix a time for it. Support the resolution with necessary details of keeping the books you want to study close by, deciding what to study and fixing the time.

Once everything is ready, rest is just a matter of following the plan.

So if you have written some resolutions for yourself, make sure you build some solid support for achieving them. Think what changes you can implement in your surrounding to help you reach your resolution.

Have a success filled new year!!

Happy New Year 2011

Wishing you all a happy new year.

Wish you all budding aeronautical engineers flying success in life!!!

Thanks for reading?

Some Books I Read This Year

Reading 40 books this year was one of my resolutions for the year 2010 and and I glad to say it was a resounding success.

Keeping books close by, having some of them on my iPod and on Amazon kindle app on my iPhone  helped achieve this goal.

Here’s listing of some of the prominent and new books that I have read…. Hope to surpass this list next year.

• BLINK – By malcom Gladwell
• Bootstaper’s bible – Seth Godin
• The 50th law   – 50 Cent and Robert Greene
• Flipping the Funnel – Seth Godin
• Principles of Excellence – John A Thomas
• CRUSH IT! – Gary Vaynerchuk
• The God Delusion – By Richard Dawkins
• Tribes – Seth Godin
• The character of Physical laws – Richard P Feynman
• Outliers – Malcom Gladwell
• Permission Marketing – Seth Godin
• Kind of Minds – Daniel Dennett
• Letting Go of God -Julia Sweeney
• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• Why sex is fun -Jared Diamond
• The Millionaire next door
• What to eat -Michael Pollan
• Freqonomics
• Conversation confidence
• How to think like Einstein
• 13 Things that don’t make sense -Michale Brooks
• Conversation confidence
• Positioning
• Genome
• Omnivore’s Dilemma -Michale Pollan
• Good to Great
• Food Rules -Michale Pollan
• I am America and so can you
• The perfect murder James, Peter
• Life support Tess Gerritsen
• Soul Identity Dennis Batchelder
• Empowered Unleash Your HERO -Josh Bernoff
• Pirate Latitude – Michael Crichton
• The tipping point by Malcolm Gladwell
• Garden of Eden – Richard Dawkins
• E=mc2 History of the famous equation
• DP, Talent is Overrated  – Daniel Coyle
• What Got You Here Won’t Get You There  Marshal Goldsmith
• Biography of Albert Einstein
• Mindset -Carol Dweck
• Drive by Daniel Pink

if I have to recommend 3 books for AeSI folks, then they will be

1. Mindset -Carol Dweck
2. DP, Talent is Overrated  – Daniel Coyle
3. Positioning

What's your resume score?

Remember my last resume post about how bad the resumes were. We are poor judge about our resumes or creations.

Well wouldn't be cool if we had some app or something that can look and analyze our resume and give us some advice on it.

As I learnt today, in fact, there's just the kind of app available on web.

So without delay, let's see what is RezScore?

"RezScore is a webapp analyzes your uploaded resume and provides surprisingly accurate advice. If you're applying for a new job and need to get your resume in shape, it could be a very helpful tool.

The functionality of RezScore is very, very simple. You upload a resume, opt in or out of being contacted about further help, and RezScore generates a page full of advice to help you improve."

Read more from Lifehacker - RezScore Grades Your Resumes and Offers Free Advice at http://lifehac.kr/hKiJxQ

Cool!! Isn't it?

more tips on preparing a super duper aerospace resume can be found via this link http://my-aesi.blogspot.com/search?q=aerospace+resume&max-results=100

Good luck

I haven't tried it myself, but will try to do it this weekend. Do let me know about your experience with the service!!

Stop multi-tasking in 2011

New year is around the corner and this is apt time to share with you the following post on why multitasking is not as good/useful as we might think.

"Based on over a half-century of cognitive science and more recent studies on multitasking, we know that multitaskers do less and miss information. It takes time (an average of 15 minutes) to re-orient to a primary task after a distraction such as an email. Efficiency can drop by as much as 40%. Long-term memory suffers and creativity — a skill associated with keeping in mind multiple, less common, associations — is reduced."

Read more here: The Conversation - You Can't Multitask, So Stop Trying http://bit.ly/ffLc0k

So if I have to just select one resolution for 2011 for myself, I will choose not to indulge in multitasking?

What about you?

Before you send your resume

A few weeks back I blogged about a requirement for performance engineer. It generated lot of cv's and as I asked my friend who was handling those cv's.

He was disappointed. Disappointed not because there was lack of talent, but because of poor presentation and quality of the resumes.

He said out of the 40+ resume he received, he had to modify 37 of them. That's a huge number. Only 3 resumes were ready to be forwarded further without any modification or correction, the rest had flaws.

I have asked him to share his advice on what he felt was wrong. He has promised to pen it.

Meanwhile here's 2 suggestions I will make to you regarding your resumes.

Proofread or ask someone apart from yourself to go through your resume. At this stage spelling mistakes are not acceptable. If you want a professional treatment, send a professional resume.

Write your most important information in the first page of your resume. This is the place a person reading your resume should have an overall idea about your professional life. Be relevant and crisp.

Please read all the topics on resume here on this blog and at other places, because resume is a marketing document and unless you pen it right, you won't attract the right job!!

click
http://my-aesi.blogspot.com/search?q=resume&max-results=100 for searching myaesi blog for resume tips and tricks!!

How did I fair in my resolutions for 2010

If you remember, I had published few of my resolutions at the beginning of this year. (Post link: http://my-aesi.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-resolutions-for-year-2010.html)

Let's draw a report card on how I did on each of them.

Continue daily updates to MyAeSI: Success. Though my frequency has been hit by lot of travel that I did this year. But I am pleased that each day, I took some time out and posted something that was useful for you guys. By the way it's a good time to thank you all for reading.

Complete 4 BIG projects in this year, 3 month for one project. Complete success.
I have created 4 excel based learning games for my daughter, developed 6 fortran games, helped creating and maintaining AeSIAA website, wrote the first draft of a office productivity ebook, created a program to write out patran neutral mesh file for any solid model and developed a VBA program to do analysis of AeSI results.

Most of the things are unpublished and I am planning to publish them online soon as I get time.

Embed the habit of focussed work, daily/weekly plan and deliberate practice in the work flow. Partial success.
All that I accomplished this year was because of applying this resolution. I created focus work schedule and stuck to it. This is partial success because I did it for 6 or 7 months and then somehow missed the plot. Would like to take this up next year.

Learn Python: Success but I still don't know python. Learning something was the actual intent of this resolution. So I set this goal. But It was a success because Instead of python, i learnt Perl. Perl happened because it was readily available in the systems that I have spent most of my time with. So I learnt Perl.

Read 40+ books: very successful. This was one goal that I hadn't mentioned in my blog entry. I set out to read more books and I am pleased that I surpassed this target. I am glad that I did it as this has expanded my horizon!

Well this was my report card on my goals for 2010, how did you fair in your resolutions?

Aeronautical Society Of India’s AGM in 2011

The next AeSI Annual General Meeting is scheduled on 16th Feb 2011 in Mumbai..

Are you planning to be there?

PDF link here

Must see website if you are going for an aerodynamics / aircraft performance interview.

Going for interview on Aircraft performance, aerodynamics or flight
mechanics. And don't want to open the Anderson's book, then this is
the post for you.

Head towards this link http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay_cat/9.htm

It has Theories of Flight (Aerodynamics) for you to revise before an
interview. The link is great for quick review required for an
interview. The concepts are well illustrated.

The best thing about this is that the theory is full and you get a big
picture view of all that you have studied in Principles of Flights.

A must link for anyone going for an interview or anyone who wants to
refresh his/her memory.

More aerospace interview related stuff at this link http://my-aesi.blogspot.com/search?q=aerospace+interview