PE Preps – Part the Third and a third

I have learned that my explanation about the pencil vs pen issue and potential cheating was not as clear as I thought when I drafted it late last night.

Recapping:

• Test takers cannot bring pens, pencils, sharpies, highlighters, crayons, pieces of coal into the test center. Only reference books, and bound notes (bound can mean hole-punched and put in a 3-ring binder, but not a glued pad of paper – interesting that distinction)
• The test agency provides mechanical pencils only for the test takers.
• Test takers can only write in the provided test booklet
• Any pencil writing NOT in the test book will be assumed to have been written AFTER starting the test, thus compromising the security of the test because it could mean that the test taker was writing down test questions to pass on to the next test taker

So, to prevent mistaken perceptions on the part of the proctor, I need to highlight over the pencil marks I’ve made (to prove that they are pre-existing), and either write everything else in pen, or photocopy the pages, AND,

don’t write in anything but the test booklet AND put the pencil down when looking in the reference material I brought in (that’s going to take training, because it’s inefficient.)

 

Oh, and I have 99 days left to study as of tomorrow. Yay.

PE Preps – Part the Third

Well, it’s July 19^th and I have 101 study days left (102 if I use the 28^th, but I need to make sure I’m ready with everything and if I don’t know it by then…). I learned an interesting tidbit the other day. I posted a question on a board about the use of post-it type tabs, because I had read that some states don’t allow them. The responses all indicated the post-its were okay, but that they had to be marked in ink. Oh, and any notes I have, whether on personal sheets or in my reference books! No one is allowed to bring pens, pencils, etc. – the testing agency provides mechanical pencils. So, why must my notes be in ink? It finally dawned on me why, and I’ll share at the end of this piece. (Friends who have taken the test – no fair spoiling it!)

So, I’m going back over my earlier notes – two sets: my current set and the ones I wrote up back in 2007 when I was studying the first time. I know now I would have been asked to leave, because I didn’t know about the pencil issue, and I had many, many pages of pencil notes. I’m still in the (re-)learning phase of my preparations and trying to cram a whole lot of info absorption into a short period. So, it’s understandable, but still frustrating when I look at something I wrote just two weeks ago with deer-in-the-headlights blankness. It makes me wonder which part of my brain needs to be switched to manage this – I can remember Bugs Bunny quotes, or lines from movies I saw 25-30 years ago, but not what I wrote last week?

Anyway, balancing the “second job”, home life, work and an additional factor are going to be one of the bigger challenges of my life to date. That 10 months getting my Master of Science degree at A&M was the worst, but this…well, given that I’ve already announced to the fam (as noted in the previous entry on this subject) that Halloween is going to be tough…

“Additional factor”? Yeah, I just sort of snuck that in there. I’ve applied for the Deputy Public Works and Engineering Director position at work (City of Plano), which will fleet up and take over the Director position when the current Director retires next year. So I am also preparing for the series of interviews that will start in August. Competition is going to be pretty stiff – at least one, and maybe one other, within the department have applied along with something like 38 outside applicants. I have heard that several of those candidates “look pretty good.” But I look better. (No lack of confidence here!) The job is perfect for me and I am perfect for the job; more to the point, I know what I can do for the City in that position – I just have to be able to demonstrate it to the interviewing teams. And I understand it will likely be teams. More on that later… (because I don’t know any more on that now.)

{Update: I didn’t get the job. They broke the news to me with “We selected Jerry, but we talked long on ‘How are we going to keep Jim?'” Flattery didn’t ease the disappointment, but the thought…}

Brain’s churning all the time, but it’s exciting. It’s a serious challenge – worthy of the time I’m putting into the PE study, the interview preparations, my work (of course), and an occasional D&D session. I’ll be missing out on fun stuff like drive-ins and sweatin’ to the Friday Night Lights tapings, but this too soon shall end.

So, the no pencil requirement…well, another rule is the test taker can only write in the test book and NOT in any of the reference material brought in (grounds for removal). I’ll tell you, I had to think a bit on why pencils were a no-no. It never occurred to me that it was about cheating. They want to make sure no one writes down test questions for future test takers. Yup. Never occurred to me. Now, what might have occurred to me was a suggestion posted in response to my question – rather than transcribe my notes in pen, I could just photocopy them and put them in a three-ring binder. But, I’ll get more value during the repetition of transcribing (see bit above about memory!)

When next I post on this subject, there will be less than three digits of study days left. But who’s counting?

PE Preps: Part the Second

For those reading on Facebook, this is posted on my WordPress blog (https://jimrazinha.wordpress.com)

I have 111 study days left as of this writing for the October 29^th exam date. I got an email yesterday that my application had been received and was being reviewed, and Andrea forwarded me another email today that I had been approved to sit for the exam. Quick turnaround, but then I had already been approved in 2007 to take the exam, so it was a simple matter to consider the additional experience.

So my plan thus far has been to read Lindeberg’s Civil Engineering Reference Manual for the PE Exam, going over the major topics of each section. I have to say, civil engineering is a lot easier than mechanical. Well, it would be if I were taking the classes over four years. I just got another book, Indranil Goswami’s “Civil Engineering All-In-One PE Exam Guide” that I’ve glanced at while looking over the Lindeberg material, but I haven’t gotten deep into it yet. I think Lindeberg’s is very comprehensive and has more than the test will cover (okay, serious understatement that), but I’m teaching myself the fundamentals of Construction, Geotechnical (soils and foundations), Structural (beams et al), Transportation (road and highway design, capacity, etc), and Water Resources and Environmental. Of the five, Water Resources is most like my mechanical background. I took several courses in structural analyses as an undergrad in 1991/2, but wasn’t a big fan. Geotech and Transportation are totally new. Construction is actually new to the exam (since 2008) and there aren’t a lot of resources to help one prepare. Given most of my experience has been in the construction field, that would seem the logical choice to take in the afternoon, but again, there aren’t a lot of resources, so I have little idea of what kind of questions they can ask. I’m thinking not.

A note on the exam format for folks unfamiliar: open book – almost any book, but you shouldn’t bring things that you really haven’t used, certain restrictions on what format your personal notes can take (no stapled or ring binder loose pages) and what calculators you can use, four hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon (40 multiple choice questions each). The morning is considered the Breadth portion and covers the five sections roughly equally (to make sure the engineer has enough knowledge of the fundamentals of the discipline). The afternoon is focused on one topic in Depth. Up until this October, the examinee was given all five and could choose which to do, but only one was graded. The powers that be changed the rules for this next round – I have to pick which to take when I register and only that one will be given to me. I guess the reasoning for the old way was “whoa, this is tougher than I thought…I’d better switch”, losing time, of course. This way forces the study focus, so I had better choose right.

Four hours, 40 questions means six minutes per question. And you usually have to choose the best answer…meaning that your answer and the four they give may not match, so you have to use your best engineering judgment! Say the question has to do with capacity; well the best answer may be the rounded up one to make sure that you’ve designed it well enough. Now, if it has to do with a safety factor, you might have to choose the one that is below the maximum you have calculated.

All the tips out there say to know the index and know the material. Just about everyone in the Civil Engineer Corps who took the PE I talked to said Transportation is the easiest as long as you have the references. Sure – if you took the courses! It does seem rather easy, but I’m trying to learn in less than a month. I already decided that I’m not going to take the Construction Depth, so I think I’m going to focus on the Water Resources and Environmental, because that seems easiest to me. Easy being relative, of course.

Anyway, my plan:

1. read and learn everything by the end of July…so far, well, so far…
   
2. re-read everything again if I “finish” early (I’m actually ahead of where I thought I’d be)
   
3. start running through problems in August (I have several problem books with solutions, and some actually have the reasons why the wrong answers are wrong. I’ve not started working many problems yet because I need the material to sink in to a “yeah, I recognize that” level and know at least where to go to find the references in the books)
   
4. focus in earnest in September on the Depth section while still reviewing the Breadth
   
5. really focus on the Depth and weak points in October
   

There’s not enough caffeine in even how I make my coffee to sustain me. Must supplement.

(I’m already resigned to having a minimalist Halloween this year. It usually takes me a solid two weeks to set everything up and then I tweak for a week more. Bummer)

…to be continued…

PE preps: Part the First

For those reading on Facebook, this is posted on my WordPress blog (https://jimrazinha.wordpress.com)

I graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1992 with a BS in mechanical engineering. After being commissioned as an Ensign in the Navy Civil Engineer Corps, Andrea and I packed up Brandon and Colin and went adventuring in Staten Island New York. I learned about the Civil Engineer Corps (CEC), construction contracting and, gulp, NYC contractors (but that’s for another story). No real engineering going on here.

After three years, I got transferred out to Port Hueneme, California to the Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center, where I had a special job planning and executing a move of 550 people from various places into a new building that was under construction. After that was done, I was shuffled around to the fill the needs of the command, ending up as the Environmental and Safety Division Director. Still no real engineering and I’m starting to understand that the CEC is about managing engineering and not really “doing” engineering.

Next up was Public Works at Point Mugu as the Shops Engineer. Shops Engineer – great, some engineering! Not exactly. But I did learn a bit about Public Works, though. And when the Navy sent me next to graduate school, I got suckered by my detailer (person-who-tells-me-where-my-next-job-is for the non-military readers) and ordered to Texas A&M for the Master of Engineering in Energy Management program. I had already been accepted to MIT for graduate work, but couldn’t figure out how to get there, as the Navy wasn’t going to pay for it (only one, two max, student(s) per year to either Stanford or MIT and I wasn’t an Admiral’s Aide, so wasn’t going to be competitive for that one slot). Anyway, before I left CA for Texas, I find out from my new advisor that the Master of Engineering required an internship that was not happening while I was still active duty – the Navy had plans for me, even if it didn’t know what they were! The kicker? Not only was that year one of the “two” years, but in May, neighbor down the street was told that a never before heard of third slot had opened up and was ordered to apply to MIT! Too late for me. Oh well.

So, given that I could not meet the requirements of the degree tailored toward professionals not sticking with academia, I had to convert to a straight Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering, though still with the emphasis on energy management. Now this is where most CEC officers took the time to study for and take the Professional Engineer License Exam (PE, for short). Two peers that were civil engineers transferred with me, and slapping myself in the forehead for not knowing you could do this, they invented a degree program over in the Civil Engineering Department that they called MS of Public Works. Me? Well that was the most brutal 10 months of my military career. Graduate Fluids and graduate Thermodynamics, two courses I aced as an undergrad, crushed me. I’m still cringing. Could be because the program I was in was designed to prepare for PhD work, and instead of learning advanced methods of applying my engineering knowledge, I was struggling to derive the Navier-Stokes equations and model the air flow over an airfoil with some kind of mathematical transposition that I’ve long since forgotten. To top it all off, after all my emails and calls requesting follow on orders were ignored for 5 ½ months, I get an email on February 4^th, 2000, telling me I had to go overseas and my choices were:

1) Adak, Alaska unaccompanied for a year,

2) Korea, or

3) Korea.

Not much of a choice!

Oh, and just to make things worse, the earmarked graduate courses that I took at OU that were accepted by TAMU in 1999 when I applied suddenly were disallowed when they did the degree review because too much time had lapsed. So I had to scramble to do additional work to get some more credits. (Not whining, it’s just more backstory.) Anyway, we never got our official passports in time (we CEC grad students were generally an administrative burden to the NROTC units), rushed travel ones through the system, had our packout screwed up (only one of the three packouts was scheduled – and they tried to schedule the other two for three days after we arrived in Korea), but still survived that and left for Korea on August 1^st, 2000 with 14 bags, four kids (two were 3 and 1), two car seats and a cat. Oh, yeah. I forgot to say that I was ordered to Fleet Activities Chinhae for duty as the Public Works Officer. And Contracting Officer – but that was a surprise, because the billet wasn’t coded for anything other than PWO.

So, having been shipped off to Korea (actually, flown off) before I had even graduated, unlike my stateside peers who had plenty of extra time not doing graduate work and weren’t isolated on the other side of the world and had the opportunity to take the PE, I became the PWO of a small base in Korea. Being small only meant the scale of projects that we did. I still had all the reporting and budget requirements, planning, contracting, you name it, of a big base, but I had three of my military subordinate billets gapped (not filled – vacant – empty) for a total of 23 out of 36 months, and another was gapped 12 months. To say I was understaffed was an understatement. No time for PE, even if I managed to get it set up for proctoring in Seoul – 250 miles away.

I retired in 2003, but stayed on as Deputy PWO in a civilian capacity for three and a half more years. That might have been a good time to take the PE, but we went through a complete reorganization of Naval shore facilities, then a re-org of Naval Facilities Engineering Command, and wrote three compete budget programs in a 12 month period for October 2004 to 2005. By that time, I was so far removed from testing that I really did not want to study again for an eight hour exam. Still, when we determined to move back, and chose Texas, and bought a house, and then moved, I applied and was approved to take the PE in April 2007. I landed six days before the test and with the first move, my return to Korea, and then my move, quality study time was too disrupted. Too stressed out, and lagged, I decided to skip the test.

Enough history. Fast forward to today. I’ve reapplied to take the PE and renewed studying for the Civil Engineering exam. Why civil? Because it’s easier than mechanical and is closer to what I’ve been doing for the past 18 years. BUT, not only do I have to relearn in the next 16 weeks all the things I’ve forgotten from 2000 and 1992, but I have to actually learn the things I never took in school for this exam: like transportation engineering, soils, hydrology (close to fluids, but not too close), and a number of other subjects. Steep learning curve packing four years into four months.

Brain tired. It’s not easy. But I have to do this.

…to be continued.