Happy Monday! About 15 years ago, I sat in a conference room on the third floor of the Engineering Building and watched my spouse defend his dissertation. After so many years of work, it was exciting to gather with our friends and family to hear his presentation. It was also…

Happy Monday! I spent the weekend at the Brody Cafe, teaching 15 visitors from around the US how to conduct training workshops using curriculum materials I’ve helped develop as part of an NSF workforce development grant. The curriculum focuses on building professional skills (Communications, Teamwork, Leadership) in the context of…

Happy Monday! Long ago, I won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. I’d always been a pretty good writer, and was fortunate to have some great faculty mentors to help me polish up the application. When I eventually returned to the College of Engineering, I started helping students prepare their own…

Happy Monday! I’m about to spend four nights in a row with my siblings and their partners. We’ve never spent that much time together as adults, without our parents or our children, and without holidays or family celebrations on the agenda. We’re renting several apartments in the same townhouse, in…

Happy Tuesday! I’m Abdo Korayem and I’m a dual PhD student in the departments of Civil and Mechanical Engineering. This newsletter is a part of an awesome project by Augusto Gil whom you might recollect from one of the previous newsletters. Augusto is a College of Engineering Leadership Fellow and…

Happy Monday! I’m at a conference, in person, for the first time in three years. It’s very people-y, and loud, and crowded, and in a HUGE convention center with a confusing layout. It’s been two and a half years since I’ve traveled for work, and I’m a little out of…

Happy Monday! One of the stranger parts of the last couple of years has been “seeing” my dad every now and then when I’m teaching over zoom. He’s not actually there, of course, and most of the time when I’m teaching my focus is on the camera lens. …

Happy Monday! We spent part of Saturday at my oldest kid’s dance recital. While I enjoyed the show, my third child thought it was a bit repetitive — a series of “teenagers in black dancing to sad songs” interspersed with “little girls in pink sparkles” hopping around to more upbeat…

Happy Monday! Sometime in childhood, I developed a phobia about fish. My folks used to take us “up north” in the summers to visit our grandparents, and we stayed in a cottage in the midst of national forest land. There were three small, inland lakes just down the road, and…