Pi Tau Sigma / Are you the Chef or the Cook?

Last night I had the opportunity to speak at a monthly Pi Tau Sigma meeting on the UW Campus. Pi Tau Sigma is the mechanical engineering honor society, and they seem to be an active organization on campus. They talked about their tutoring activities at local schools and participation in other fraternity activities.

My presentation covered the current state of business and how it relates to engineering students and their future job prospects. I included some background on how it has gotten to be this way, and what I think the future engineers need to do to succeed in this new environment. I will try to summarize the topics briefly:

• Factories - Do you view your local McDonalds as a factory? I do.
• Indoctrination - How did it get to be this way? Is the school system actually training us to be factory workers? What do we do when we don't need factory workers anymore?
• Business - Cheaper, faster, better, cheaper. In the new throw away world, what makes you (as an employee) impossible to throw away?
• Do what you do - this is hard to quantify in words, but I will use the Chef/Cook example. Are you the Chef, someone who creates something new using the same ingredients that have always been available to everyone? Or are you the Cook that uses the cookbook to create what is asked of them? Which one is more valuable?
• Leverage social media - There are numerous tools out there that you can use to build an online resume. Starting blogging about your activities. Start taking videos or pictures and posting them. Share what you do with the world, you never know who is paying attention out there. Paper resumes are going to be a thing of the past and your internet content is going to become the new resume.

There were lots of great questions at the end, and the discussions the ensued were fun and engaging. I want to thank Pi Tau Sigma for the opportunity and hope that I can speak again at a meeting in the spring.