Floundering. Words come and go easily. No, actually words come like a large man running a marathon. Well, actually, in a way they do come and go easily, but only as fragments. And if the point of words is to project intelligence (which it isn’t), that ideal is far from achieved.

I’ve heard it many times, “We learn (insert discipline here) so we are able to speak the (insert name of discipline practitioner here)’s language.” Example: “we learn economics so we are able to speak the economist’s language.”

This is rock-solid thinking. You don’t have to be able to solve the force of the vortex created by a jet engine at takeoff to understand the concept of flight and you don’t have to be a computer scientist to understand a little about networking.

If you do understand conceptually (a little technical knowledge is good too) what’s going on, you can talk intelligently about a subject, but if you don’t, you’re lost.

If you’re lost, that’s ok, just admit it up front. There’s nothing worse than listening to someone stumble through something that they have no clue about. Except maybe being the person stumbling through something that you have no clue about. Some people are good at it. I’m not, and I feel it acutely when I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Lesson learned today. Admit emphatically up front if you have no clue, the more eloquently the better.

I acquired an Institute of Industrial Engineers flier. They have pictures of twenty-four individuals in the publication. As best I can tell there are twelve women and twelve men pictured.

In my IE 337 class, which all Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering majors have to take, there are roughly thirty-five people enrolled. Of those, perhaps seven are women, and that’s probably being generous. That means that there is probably a 4:1 ratio—at least—of men to women.

Suffice it to say, the flier presents a skewed picture. Maybe it’s a picture of their ideal. Maybe Oregon State University is the only college in the United States where men vastly outnumber girls in the engineering disciplines (laugh laugh, hack hack…excuse me, I’m choking).

Trust me, if you’re going to college to sit beside girls in class, don’t go for Engineering. Go for Elementary Ed. or Psychology.

This brings me to another point.

There’s some rule in the NFL (National Football League) that says when a team is interviewing head coaches, they have to consider (I think that includes interviewing) minority candidates. Sort of a crazy rule. I mean, they’re a private corporation, so they can do what they want, but in principle telling a team they have to consider people solely based on their race is sort of ridiculous.

However. However, I know why they do it. They’re doing their best to legislate racism out of their ranks. Let’s say there’s lingering bigotry in certain team leadership structures (owners, general managers, other team officials). There are plenty of white head coaching candidates that are qualified, compared to a relatively few amount of black head coaches that are similarly capable. If there’s racism, those prejudiced teams are always going to give the benefit of the doubt to the white man.

Furthermore, if we go back in time and there had never been laws made forcing certain entities to include black people (certain restaurants, for instance), the civil rights movement may have never come to fruition. In this case, legislating morality was the best solution from the state’s perspective. Yes, really the only solution. They’re not in the business of changing hearts.

Just consider the NFL situation a microcosm of the state back in the 60’s, although this application is much more tenuous and its validity much more dubious.

Much is made in the Engineering world of all the formal, classroom education that you need. But they also tell you that one of the things that will help you get a job is leadership capability. How do you show leadership capability? Certainly not by a degree or a demonstration, but by experience. No formal training here. Just experience, serving on a committee or being a student officer for a club. What up with that?

Do you get my point?