Job Description - Lee

I've been working in my new job for a couple of months now and I suppose it is safe to say I now have some idea what my job entails. While the job will evolve along with my language skills and to some extent what I want to do with it, at this time I basically have five main duties.

1) Work with teams in Basic Lab sections in English. Basic Lab is a course that all KIT students take, which introduces them to the scientific method and makes them dream up, actualize, and improve an experiment. Usually, substantial improvement is required to have anything worthwhile, and sometimes science is still really not the result. However, the purpose of the class is to inspire the correct lines of thought rather than real scientific output. Japanese students spend most of middle school and high school studying for tests rather than doing science experiments and writing reports as would be more common in America, so they are behind where one might expect an American class to be in experimental thought and skills. Having read some of the lab reports that Todd was grading when he was in charge of Mechanics of Materials lab at RIT, I wouldn't expect that much from an American class either.

Anyhow, they're trying to do science, and I walk around the room trying to figure out what they're doing, how they're doing it, and if either of those things make any engineering sense. If it does, great, and I move on. If not, further attempts at communication ensue until they either understand my objections or I go and get another teacher to explain it in Japanese. If its something like 'how about you put a cover over the 99% of the photon sensor that isn't recieving laser radiation to have less noise in your results?' I can usually get that across. If my objection is more like 'please don't use higher-order polynomial regression models to describe your crappy data, your standard deviation is way too high to suggest that anything other than a linear model is practical and by using regression like that you're implying that the results are not due to noise in your data but actually reflect experimental fact' I probably need help.

2) Work with teams in Engineering Design 2. ED2 is similar to Basic Lab except that the big project is a low level design project instead of an experiment, and there are a lot more presentations and posters and things. The purpose of the class is basically to team them to work in teams on design projects, which seems a little silly to me because the students are team-working machines as far as I can tell. The 'design' content is a little low, without any analysis or detailed design. Were I in charge of a section of this, I would work them a little harder than the plan calls for and they would get a lot more out of it. On the other hand, they're younger and less experienced then the students of a design project class in the US, by about a year.

My part is to find out about their design projects, help them with engineering content, and to help them put things into English for sharing with students at Rose-Hulman Institute of Tech in Indiana. Some sections of ED2 are part of a trial collaboration between KIT, RHIT, and Asia University in Taiwan. I set up a new webmeeting rig and software so that we can run better web meetings with those schools, and I help the students prepare materials in English to share.

3) I participate in the translation of Japanese research papers into English. Most of the professors have some level of English writing ability, and a few can consistently write correct English. However, as a native speaker of English, I can add perspective, polish, and a certain level of linguistic elegance to the proceedings, as well as adding in clarifications where necessary. In the near future I expect to become a part of the research that goes into some of these papers, mostly engineering education research, and will probably begin writing some papers in English in the first place myself. I'm pretty psyched to be involved as my Master's of Engineering was more directed towards the practice of engineering in industry rather than research, and getting published a few times will substantially enhance my research credibility if I decide after this that I'm going for a PhD. Also the school may pay for me to go to conferences to present the papers; there is talk of sending me to an international conference in Nagoya (still in Japan) in August.

4) I prepare and present information about the American university educational system that may interest an audience of Japanese professors. RIT is a co-op school, and co-op is generally not present in Japan, so I have been asked to prepare a substantial presentation as a primer to the subject. After that one, they want to know about AP classes, community colleges, transfer credit, and the interaction between all of the above and traditional 4-year degree programs. I'm not sure how many presentations in total I have information for, but for now it rounds things out a little and makes me feel more useful.

5) Learn Japanese ASAP. I'm 1240 / 2140 through the alphabet right now, hoping to achieve some low level of literacy within the year. After I plow through the alphabet I'll put more emphasis on speaking. I can say some things and many of the more common words I've already picked up or had to learn for Basic Lab or Ed2.

The classes I'm involved in and the work will probably evolve somewhat, and they tell me if my Japanese gets good enough they'll probably put me in charge of my own classes, but that is some way off in the future. For now though, I have a job, its pretty good, and I have a lot of chances to learn more stuff. Can't complain. Especially with something like 13 weeks off per year, if I'm reading the schedule correctly.