Shouzer

My task for today was to get new tires put on my sister’s car, and when I got it in the morning, I found out it needed an oil change as well. No problem, right? I have a Bachelor’s degree in engineering, I was one of the project leaders on the hybrid vehicle project, where we redesigned the entire powertrain of an SUV, and I worked as an intern at a company that designs cars, where I got sterling reviews and an offer for full-time employment.

I bought the oil and the filter, then I took the car home and pulled it out on the grass. I went and collected all of the supplies I would need: socket wrenches, oil pan, a towel, and funnel. Then, I crawled under the car, and immediately things were going great. I could actually reach the drain plug and the oil filter with no problem. I was loving that because you have to jack my car and remove a skid plate to have a chance at reaching either of those. I was actually whistling while I drained the oil.

Then, I got to the oil filter. This SOB was stuck on there pretty good, so I grabbed the towel to get a better grip. Still, no success. So I decided to grab one of those gripper things from the kitchen that’s for opening jars; it gave me less grip than the towel. I’m getting pretty frustrated at this point. There are special wrenches you can get for removing oil filters. We have three of them, and all of ours are too big for the oil filter on this car, of course. Incidentally, they are too big for mine as well, and I would invest in a smaller one if I was ever going to change my oil again.

Well, it was time for the big guns. I got some vice grips out of the tool bench. It was nearly impossible to get the around the filter because of obstructions on the car and the ground. I would have jacked the car to get more room, but I was off in the grass. I didn’t want to die. So I fought with the vice grips for a while, and called around trying to find someone who had one of those wrenches I could borrow. I probably should have just walked to Walmart to buy one.

Anyway, after about an hour of trying, giving up, sitting, and then trying again, I got a decent grip on the filter, and I turned it about 1/2 a turn. I figured I was set now that it was loose. Nope, I had to turn it about 2 full turns before it was loose enough to turn by hand. When I finally got the thing off the car, it looked like this:

From now on, I’m taking my cars to the oil change place. It cost me $17 for the oil and the filter. I think Marion Toyota charges like $20-25 to do it. That’s obviously worth the money.

Maybe when I get my PhD I will be qualified to change the oil in my car. I am clearly not trained for such a chore. Either that, or I need to spend more time at the gym and less time in the lab.

Today is the last day of my TEFL course in Prague. It has been pretty fun. I’ve met loads of cool people, and I had a nice time in Prague.

I accepted a job this morning in Bangkok at the Fun Language Institute. It’s a school for kids ages 3-15. I think it should be a pretty good time. I start work there on May 2.

Sorry I haven’t written any textually detailed posts since I got here. I really don’t know what to say about it.

Today I finished up my last shift with Nicole Bernal, a 4th year general surgery resident and the Trauma Chief at SLU Hospital for the past six months. Nicole was kind enough to let me shadow her during the month of December and again this month after returning from a two month stent at St. John’s–a hospital off of I-64/270.

This was more than a shadowing expereince–she treated me like an intern, which was pretty awesome and scary. I was in my SLU-issued scrubs armed with a trauma pager, phone, and stethoscope. I was as official as I could get without the M.D. behind my name.

When she was in-house I was in-house, be it a 12-hour shift or a 24-hour shift. The day would start at 6 a.m. when we would get the sign-out from the night team. At 7 a.m. we would start rounding on all the patients. I had my patient list and I would go fill out the progress note, record any labs that were drawn, and check on any radiology films. I would then meet with her and we would go over any pertinent findings and get everything ready for Grand Rounds with the Attending physician.

When a trauma came, my pager went off and I headed to the ER. It was difficult working in the exact same setting with my co-workers in the ER but being in a different role. I wasn’t the ER tech in the trauma anymore. She let me examine Level II traumas and get their history. I filled out the H&P form and wrote admission orders for the floor or ICU.

But I didn’t just do paperwork. I was able to get some procedures done as well. I assisted with at least 10 chest tubes (placed one of them), some intubations, reductions of fractures, FAST Ultrasound exams, splinting, some resuscitation….and I got to practice suturing as well.

I also got to go to the OR on cases. I saw three ex-laps, a left lower extremity fasciotomy, craniotomy and lobectomy, triple-A repair. The OR cases were really interesting and it was a great way to see real anatomy.

One of the things I like the most was that she spent a lot of time reviewing CTs and Xrays and showing me how to read them….and then asking me what I saw on new films as we reviewed them.

When there was nothing to do and we were caught up with everything, I crashed in a call room. And, of course, I would sleep for 30-45 minutes (if I was lucky) and the pager would go off. My favorite was this…and this is how it went out over the pager “TRAUMA TEAM STAT: 26 y/o M GSWx3 Homeboy dropoff”

This is pretty much how I looked after one night in the ER after six traumas:

I think my eyes were a little more glossed over and blood shot because I was so tired though.

It was an awesome expereince….one that challenged me physically, mentally, and emotionally. She taught me a lot. If anything the experience of being on the trauma team has only strengthened my desire to be a doctor.

It’s gonna be sad going to work this weekend as a tech again. Oh well, I’ll survive it.

People have been asking me all year what I’m going to do when I graduate. The official end of exam week Feb 22, so it’s coming up pretty soon. Well, I am hear to answer that question once and for all.

I have enrolled in a program to train me to become a TEFL teacher. TEFL is Teaching English as a Foreign Language. The program, which is in Prague, lasts one month, starting March 19. Afterwards, I will get a job teaching English somewhere, hopefully. I obviously have some preferences, but it will depend heavily on where I can land a job. There is a lot of demand in Asia and Eastern Europe, so I might end up there. Western Europe is difficult because most countries want EU citizens.

Most TEFL teachers make enough to support themselves and maybe save a little. I’m certainly not doing it for the money as I got job offers with much better pay than I would ever get as a teacher, even in the US.

After the year abroad, I plan to go to grad school, hopefully in robotics with a specialty in autonomous vehicles. I know you are thinking that I should have applied for grad school for this upcoming year, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do yet. Autonomous vehicles is something I have always been interested in, but I was really leaning towards alternative energy in the fall. I couldn’t find any programs in alternative energy that I liked, and I was unable to land a job that had any kind of interest to me. I don’t want to be a corporate monkey.

Here’s a link to the program I am doing: http://www.teflworldwideprague.com/

I will, of course, document my adventures here on Shouzer, and I will take solace in know that I will be done with that program before any of you graduate.

It occurred to me tonight after I got home from work, showered, and changed that I hadn’t posted about any of my experiences in the ER recently, and today was a great day for me (though not for the patients), so I figured it was time for another update.

Started off fairly slow, but a nice steady pace, nothing too major or crazy, but that would all change, of course.

It changed around 11 a.m. when our transfer from Herrin Hospital arrived. It was a 68 y/o female with necrotizing fasciitis. This is a severe systemic bacterial infection. It starts usually when the patient gets a small cut or scratch. Her infection was so severe it involved all layers of the skin, her subcutaneous tissue, muscle sheath, and muscle tissues themselves.

From the report we got from Herrin’s ER, when she arrived, her arm was red, blistered, and swollen to just below her elbow. When she arrived here, it had spread up to her shoulder and there was crepitus (air in her tissue, it felt like bubble rap packing under her skin) all in her chest.

Since it was spreading so quickly, we rushed her to the OR where they had to amputate the arm. Her chest film after the amputation revealed that it had spread further across her chest and was now near her left arm as well. Her prognosis is not good at all.

My second major story deals with a man who fell 65 feet off a scaffolding downtown. When he fell, he hit a beam or piece of sheet metal and it amputated his left arm. It wasn’t completely severed, it was still attached by a little bit of muscle and tissue. He was in bad shape from the fall, obviously and was in severe shock from the blood loss. He was also rushed to the OR.

The cool thing I got to do on him was assist the Trauma Chief tie off his bleeding brachial artery and his cephalic and basilic veins. That was pretty freakin’ awesome, though probably only Al would get as big a kick out of it as me.

After assisting, I was on extremity duty for a bit. I had to make sure the arm remained covered, clean, and cold. It’s sad, but it served as a great anatomy refresher.

That was pretty much all of the exciting stuff for today. Everything else was pretty much run-of-the-mill normal stuff.

Hope you guys are enjoying your weekend!

I had an interview with a company back in August that I was pretty interested in working for, and they said they wanted to talk again in October.  I have been trying to get this guy on the phone all month with no success.  He’s not returning my calls either.  So today, I figured I would throw up a hail marry attempt to get a phone call.  My plan was to leave a voice mail that sounded like a was a desperate guy who’s girlfriend wasn’t returning his calls.  I was then going to tell him I was joking, but that I would still like to hear from him.  It was supposed to sound something like this:

“Hello, this is Scott.  We talked back in August, and you mentioned that you wanted to speak again in October.  I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all month, but you haven’t been returning my calls.  What happened?  Don’t you love me any more!?  Just kidding.  Seriously though, it would be nice to hear from you again.  My number is xxx-xxx-xxxx.  Please give me a call.”

Unfortunately, I pulled a Beltran.  In other words, I choked hard.  It came out something like this:

“Hello, this is Scott.  We spoke back in August, and you said you wanted to speak again in October.  Well, it’s the last day of the month, and I haven’t heard from you yet.  I’d like to know what’s going on, so please give me a call.  My number is xxx-xxx-xxxx.”

When it came time to pull the trigger on the punch line, I just couldn’t muster the courage.  So I ended up sounding like a pathetic loser instead of a suave player.

 Update [11-2-06]:  He called me back today, and it was one of the weirdest phone calls ever.  I apologized for the awkward message, and I explained what happened.  He apologized for not calling me back sooner.  Then, he wanted to know about my senior design project.  I told him what I am doing, and he seemed to be pretty impressed with it.  He asked me to send him an email with some pictures of the project, and he offered to donate hardware if we needed it.  I still cannot figure out why.  There was no mention of a job or an upcoming interview.  I am so confused.

Last Tuesday, I had the craziest interview of my life. I don’t want to mention the name of the company, but I will say that they are a defense contractor because it is integral to the story.

I walked into the interview, and the very first thing he did was grill me about my GPA. My GPA is not as good as it could be, but I’m certainly not ashamed of it either. The whole thing was very unnerving though, and it set a bad tone for the rest of the interview.

Later on in the interview, I started asking him questions. I wanted to know what the company ethic was like, so I asked him, “How do you feel morally about making ballistic missile control systems that could kill lots of people?”

Big mistake there. His eyes bugged out of his head, and he literally stared me down as he said, “I come from a soldiering family. My relatives are all soldiers and sailors. I feel that any time they are called upon to go to war they should have the best possible equipment. Their lives are an extremely high priority to me.”

I am not a peace activist or anything, but I’m just not sure I could handle the idea of working on such an offensive weapon. Anyway, there was no way I was going to work for these guys, so I sent him this email:

Dear Interested Potential Employer:
We appreciate your time and interest in providing an employment opportunity to J. Scott Parks. Unfortunately, at this time, we feel that you do not meet our employer criteria. We interviewed many applicants in the job search process and decided to pursue a company whose credentials and qualifications were better suited for our needs. Thus we will not be accepting your position, but thank you for your interest. If a need arises for us to contact you in the future, we will do so and you have our continued good wishes.
Very truly yours,
Scott Parks
Senior Electrical Engineer

Today, I had to go to a seminar for my senior design project, and the guys I was eating lunch with started talking about their experiences with this same guy. They had all been grilled about their GPAs, even the guy with a double degree who had a 3.77. (I would consider him to be in the top 5% of people at Rose in terms of smarts).

It also seems that he talked about me in all of his subsequent interviews. They all said that he mentioned interviewing an antiwar person earlier in the day, and he couldn’t understand why such a person would interview with a defense contractor. Clearly, it was a mistake on my part.

Well, I’m sitting in the Champaign airport right now, as my flight has been delayed for a while. Apparently there were strong winds and ice all day in Chicago, and it’s slowing everything down. I figured it was about time to give an update.

As I mentioned a couple (few?) weeks ago, this semester has been crazy for me. I’ve had interviews like you wouldn’t believe, and a lot of that has meant me having to fly out of the state for a few days at a time. The interviews themselves are bad enough, but then I’ve got homework I need to catch up and exams I need to study for. It’s been hectic, to say the least.

This should more or less be the final interview trip I go on, though. After that, my schedule actually lightens up quite a bit. Hopefully once that happens I should be able to get back in the swing of posting.

So, what’s new? Well, not too much really. School is school, and work is work. I have recently switched over to using Google Reader for my RSS love and to Google Calendar for my schedule info. The reader just got a big upgrade a few days ago, and it flies like a native app now. I liked it when it originally came out, but it was always too slow for me to give it any real use. When the calendar went public over the summer, it didn’t have support for Safari, and that kept me away from it. They’ve since added that support, and it’s worth checking it out if you have any interest in a calendar app.

That’s it for now.

It seems like I’m always studying this semester, and it’s really not that fun. I know I’m busier than I’ve been in the past, and the career stuff is a big part of that. I’m fairly certain that I’ve just been doing a lot more studying in addition.

My interviews all seemed to go pretty well last week. For the most part, they were pretty similar. They all had basic questions about some of my past projects, some questions about what I’m good at, and then a coding question or two.

The interview that actually went the best was on Thursday with a company called Business Logic. That interview went about as good as I could have exptected. Hopefully the others went as well as I thought, too.

Today was the first day of one of our fall engineering career fairs, and through it I landed two interviews (so far). The first one is tomorrow at 11:30 with a company called SalesForce. The second, set for Wednesday at 2:30, is with Microsoft. I’m definitely looking forward to it, and hopefully everything goes well.

Also, Jordy had a little steganography puzzle over at Confabuler that I cracked. This just leads me to believe that I am indeed prepared for this years PuzzleCrack. Ludwig won’t know what hit him.

It has been a long time since my last post, and for that, I apologize.  I haven’t had much worth writing about lately.

 Yesterday, I went over to the Milford Proving Grounds yesterday for a tour, and I got to stay for the Technology Show, which is a showcase of all the the powertrain technology.  They had a bunch of cars out for people to drive, and I tried an Escalade, a Saab 93, and an Astra from Germany.  The show-stealer was the Corvette Z06 with 505hp.  It was absolutely amazing.  It was cool to get to see the Powertrain facilities and all of the test tracks as well.

 I also went to see the new Steve Carell movie, Little Miss Sunshine, which was brilliant.  The story centered around a disfunctional family taking their daughter to the Little Miss Sunshine beauty contest.  The whole movie was hilarious, but the ending at the beauty contest stole the show.  It’s a pretty low budget, small time movie so it’s not showing in southern Illinois or Terre Haute.  That’s just another reason I much prefer living in cities.

I’m having one of those days at work today. I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about, but if you don’t that’s just tough. I’m not going to elaborate in a public forum such as this. To get my mind off of it I decided that I should eat out for lunch.

I ended up at this Middle-Eastern place called Cedarland, and it was surreal. This place had the look and feel of a mom and pop diner. It honestly reminded me of Triple E Barbeque. Their clientele was mostly older-looking white people, and the décor was also reminiscent of a neighborhood diner. The whole thing completely caught me off guard. The food was really good though, and it got my mind off work so I guess everything worked out well.

I should mention that by the time I left it had become more of what I was expecting. Most of the people there were part of the corporate lunch crowd having a casual meal alone or with 1-2 friends.

I had my first class on Wednesday night; it’s an introductory sociology class.  I was a bit surprised to find that there are only about 20 people in the class, all of whom seem to be Detroit natives.  Most of them are majoring in some arts subject.  It’s weird for me to be around people like that because they act and think so much differently than the engineers and scientists I’m used to.  The prof wanted to make a point that we only believe things because society tells us they are true, so he picked a well know fact, that America was discovered in 1492 to prove his point.  So this kid sitting next to me goes off on a rant that America was discovered when people migrated over the land bridge between Alaska and Russia.  He was seriously mad that the prof was implying that America was discovered by Columbus.  I have heard of people like this, but I didn’t know they actually existed.  Talk about a loser.  Speaking of losers, the prof went around the room and made us all tell him why we were taking the class.  Some girl told him she thought it would make her a more well rounded person.  He then proceeded to make fun of her for lying about something like that.  I told him I was taking the class because it started at 5:30.

After class, I went down to the fireworks display downtown.  Detroit has the 2nd biggest fireworks display in the country, with 4 million people attending.  I was pretty impressed with them.  I took a picture with my cell phone that I was thinking of putting up here, but the quality is not very good.  Plus I was too lazy to upload it to my web space.  Maybe I will get ambitious tonight and do that. Next week is shut down week.  All of GM is on vacation.  I have to stay in Detroit because of my class, but I won’t be at work.  On the up side, I get my very first paid vacation on the 4th.  I’ve never been paid to take a day off before; I can’t wait for that action.  There’s a big festival called the Taste Fest, similar to the Chicago taste fest, which features lots of local food vendors and free concerts.  I’ll probably go to that this weekend.  The All American Rejects are playing on the 4th, and I really like them.  Bowling for Soup and Yellowcard are playing next weekend as well, and I would definitely like to go to those concerts if I can find anyone to go with me.  Steve Miller Band and an orchestral version of Led Zeppelin are also coming up soon.  One of the other interns mentioned going to those so I might go as well.

The ChallengeX competition finished up last Thursday. We ended up getting 10th overall which I was pretty happy with considering we didn’t have our first test until 3am the night before it shipped. We had a few little Dur-Dee-Dur’s that cost us some pretty big points as well, but I really didn’t care how well we finished. The biggest mistake was when someone forgot to put the fuse back in for the engine cooling fan which resulted in our engine overheating in two of the major events. We also had some major problems with our transmission leaking and breaking down. On the up side though, we did well enough that GM is going to give us a new transmission-electric motor combo so we shouldn’t have those problems next year. The thing they are giving us is pretty sweet. It has two electric motors and a transmission to tie them together with the engine. Plus, it has a 2 speed transmission in it as well, so it sort of has 2 transmissions. It’s kind of hard to explain without getting into some major jargon. Basically though, it will replace our 2 electric motors and our homemade transmission plus give us two speeds instead of one. All of this in a package about the size of one of our current electric motors. Oh, and I forgot to mention that is has more power than our current setup. They originally did not want to give it to us because they thought it would give us too much of advantage over other teams, but I guess we got enough people pulling strings for us that it finally went through.

I had to give three presentations on the last day of the competition. The control strategy presentation, given by me and one other guy, was the biggest point event of the competition. They had 13 corporate big-wigs in this room trying to rip holes in our presentation. I felt pretty exhausted afterward, but I guess we did decently because we got 6th place in that. I also gave 2 presentations for sponsor awards, National Instruments and Freescale. I gave the NI talk basically myself although there was a short demo by another guy, and the prof wrote a paper that we had to submit beforehand. We got 2nd place and $750 for that. I was pretty happy with that. The Freescale award was a disaster. We tried to Captain Planet it by having 4-5 guys talk about different stuff. They were not impressed, but to be honest I don’t even know why we tried to do it. We hardly used there stuff at all. So they ripped us a new one.

I started my new job in Detroit last Monday. I finally got a computer on Friday afternoon. I have yet to get a GM user/pass or the software I need to do the work they want me to do. I didn’t do any real work until Thursday at which point I started assisting the guy I’m going to work with. I basically just made some cables and connectors. That was good because I did not know how to do any of that stuff, and he taught me some good tricks. I was transferred to a new position the week before I came here, and they did not tell me until I got here. Honestly though, what I am doing now sounds basically like what they said I would be doing. I am working in a different location than I thought I would be though, Pontiac instead of Warren.

I am going to be working on a controller for a piece of equipment that tests seat belt anchorages. It sounds like a pretty decent assignment. The department where they do the testing is pretty cool. They have a bunch of hydraulic machines set up to do tests like that on various parts of the car. For instance, there is a machine that slams the doors on the car repeatedly to test the latches. They had big machines that shake the chassis, powertrain, suspension, etc. to see how they will hold up under road conditions. The idea is they take the car out on the test track and get real drive cycles, and then they bring the parts into this lab to test them under the same drive cycle to get repeatable test conditions.

My apartment is really nice. It is a 2 bedroom/2 bath with walk in closets in both rooms, huge overstuffed suede couches, fully furnished kitchen including dishwasher, and washer/dryer. My roommates are pretty cool as well. They thought I was coming in about 3 weeks ago so they were pretty shocked when I showed up. Two of them were gone home last weekend, and the other one came in about 3:30am Saturday night to find me sleeping in his bedroom in the spare bed. I guess he was a little freaked out. The area around the apartment is pretty upscale as well so it should work out well.

Thursday morning was my last final. I finished up with it around 11am, and went directly to work on ChallengeX. Around 3:30am Thursday night, we took the ‘Nox out for the first road test ever. I was riding shotgun as we drove down Wabash Ave (45 mph speed limit) at 72mph with no headlights. The car performed amazingly, especially in high speed charging mode, in which we drive >40mph and charge the 360V battery at the same time. The car drags a little between 0-50, but it hauls from 50-70. We lost the vehicle tailing us when we did the 50-70 test that night. Afterwards, we went for the mandatory celebratory trip to IHOP. I got home that morning around 6am, took a shower and a 1.5hour nap. Then, we reconvened to prep the ‘Nox for shipping. That’s right, we did our first road test 7 hours before shipping it. Not something I would highly recommend btw. I would have liked to have had more time for testing, but this makes for a totally cool story.

While I’m talking about ChallengeX, I have to tell you about this guy on the team named Tom. Tom is 2nd in command of the Fab team, which means he puts all of the mechanical stuff in the car, and he was instrumental in the design/building of our custom transmission. Anyway, Tom pulled an all-nighter Wednesday night fabbing up a new driveshaft. (We sheared the bolts on our previous one). He showed up 45 minutes late to his 8am final, and then left about an hour later. Edit: I was also in this final, and it took me around 3 hours. He told me later that he only needed to get a 55% on it so he wasn’t trying hard. End Edit Then, he proceeded to return to work on ChallengeX. Around 11-12 that night, he got bored because we were doing some electrical/controls testing. So he decided to build a little 5hp moped. It took him like 30 minutes. The guy is insane. He ended up staying up for like 50 hours straight, working on ChallengeX almost the whole time.

Today, I moved into my new place in the Haute. That went pretty smoothly actually. On Tuesday, we’re flying our to Phoenix for the big testing competition. I’m really looking forward to it now that our car is fully functional. I was starting to dread it up to that night because I didn’t think we would finish. I believe I’ll have internet access there so I’ll try to post updates.

In other news, I had yet another hard drive replacement yesterday. Hooray Compaq! Actually, the hard drives are Hitachi so Hooray Hitachi!