First, last October a colleague asked if I would write a Letter of Recommendation for her application to Graduate School. (She had decided to pursue a completely different career after 8 or 9 years in IBM.) I was flattered that she thought highly enough about me to ask and was glad to agree to her request.
After accepting the request, I did experience some discomfort when I read that among the attributes of a "Good Person to Ask to Write a Letter of Reccommendation" were that they:
- Be well known
- Be able to write a good letter
Yikes. So I went back to my colleague and told her that I would be willing to give it the old college try on the letter part, but I couldn't do much about that first qualification. (Who in the hell is Joe Nedimyer?)
Anyways, she recently learned that she was accepted to Grad School, gave her two weeks notice, and resigned from IBM a couple of weeks ago to pursue her new career.
Last summer, I mentored one of our College Interns for a couple of months. James was a blast to work with and bright as hell and did some really good work for my old team. (Our manager at that time, Dave, a Penn State grad and huge fan, would kid James (also from Penn State) about "watching out for Nedimyer since he went to Pitt"). Apparently, the Pitt-Penn State rivalry doesn't run as deep for these young kids as it did when Dave and I went to college.
He went back to Penn State last December to resume studies while continuing to work part-time for IBM. In February, I received a request from NASA for a letter of recommendation for James for their well-thought of summer coop program. On Friday, I was chatting with James and pleased to find out that he had been accepted into that program, where he will be working on genetic algorithms - cool stuff.
Up until I was about 24 or so, I used to think that my left-brain orientation would prohibit me from ever being a passable writer. Writing and composition were more art in my mind than anything else - those artsy Liberal Arts majors could have it and I didn't need it. My thinking was such that at Pitt, I took "Calc 4 - Differential Equations" for kicks my senior year even though neither my Major (Computer Science) or Minor (Mathematics) required it. This was the safe choice for me - it was an easy 4 credits and I didn't have to sweat out some course with major writing requirements in it.
Anyways, she recently learned that she was accepted to Grad School, gave her two weeks notice, and resigned from IBM a couple of weeks ago to pursue her new career.
Last summer, I mentored one of our College Interns for a couple of months. James was a blast to work with and bright as hell and did some really good work for my old team. (Our manager at that time, Dave, a Penn State grad and huge fan, would kid James (also from Penn State) about "watching out for Nedimyer since he went to Pitt"). Apparently, the Pitt-Penn State rivalry doesn't run as deep for these young kids as it did when Dave and I went to college.
He went back to Penn State last December to resume studies while continuing to work part-time for IBM. In February, I received a request from NASA for a letter of recommendation for James for their well-thought of summer coop program. On Friday, I was chatting with James and pleased to find out that he had been accepted into that program, where he will be working on genetic algorithms - cool stuff.
Up until I was about 24 or so, I used to think that my left-brain orientation would prohibit me from ever being a passable writer. Writing and composition were more art in my mind than anything else - those artsy Liberal Arts majors could have it and I didn't need it. My thinking was such that at Pitt, I took "Calc 4 - Differential Equations" for kicks my senior year even though neither my Major (Computer Science) or Minor (Mathematics) required it. This was the safe choice for me - it was an easy 4 credits and I didn't have to sweat out some course with major writing requirements in it.
That thinking totally changed once I joined industry. It turns out that I learned quickly that writing is an important part of the professional engineer's job as all sorts of software development phases require the ability to communicate clearly with the written word. We develop all sorts of documents such as Requirements Specifications, Software Architecture Definitions, High and Low-Level Software Design Documents, and contribute to user manuals and guides. I took a really cool class, called Designing To Write, when I was working at IBM Rockville and learned that there are many parallels between designing software and writing and that any engineer, with some discipline, could be a passable writer.
Now before some anal-retentive blog reviewer pours through this site and finds some dangling participle or horrible use of tense in this blog, please understand that I am not implying that I write well - but for an engineer, I don't do too badly.
Now before some anal-retentive blog reviewer pours through this site and finds some dangling participle or horrible use of tense in this blog, please understand that I am not implying that I write well - but for an engineer, I don't do too badly.
