Two years ago I read the first edition of Tim Ferriss’s 4-hour Work Week (see related post: How Much is Your Time Worth? – Unexpected engineering lessons from “The 4-Hour Workweek.”) - and was instantly inspired to create my very own internet product.

My first marvelous informational product (you be the judge after downloading it below), the Successful Unemployed Toolkit - failed miserably. I spend a lot more money on trying to market the product than I brought in by selling it. Turns out that engineering-related information does not lend itself to internet marketing as easily as “Become a Gazillioner while sitting on your couch” or “Loose 300lb NOW” type of information. It’s a lot more challenging to market and sell stuff to the scientific community (I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it’s because we’re more skeptical or simply smarter than the rest of the world ).

But as they say, it’s only a failure if you don’t learn from it. After selling a whopping 12 Successful Unemployment Toolkits, spending about $2000 on marketing, and shutting down the product website, I learned that:

- Nothing beats the thrill of selling a product that you dreamed-up and created from start to finish (even if you only sell 12 of them). Thus…

- …I cannot fathom going back to creating products for someone else (MVP has greatly benefited from this realization and is enjoying successful growth as I continue to create and develop my own products)

- Social media is an absolutely indispensable and free tool for any business or a individual

- Public speaking can be a lot of fun and I got a lot of practice as part of my first failed product marketing experience

- It’s a great big world of information out there - just because you got your degree, learning does not have to stop!

Now, what’s in it for you? Although I failed to make the Successful Unemployed Toolkit into a revenue-generating product, I still think that the information that I provide in it is very relevant and extremely useful to any engineer or scientist who is looking to grow professionally, or needs to find a job.

So I am giving away the Successful Unemployed Toolkit completely FREE. You don’t have to sign-up for anything. Just click on the link below, download and enjoy (if you find the information useful, I always appreciate your comments and e-mails!)

I will be giving away the toolkit in THREE PARTS during the month of October. Part one consists of first third of the MP3 audio portion and the Reference Guide. Parts 2 and 3 will include second and third parts of the audio, respectively.

(This Download is virus-free, and NO, you DONT’t have to provide your phone, e-mail, or sign your life away in general. Just download and enjoy!)

What is the Successful Unemployment Toolkit™? ( This text is directly from my, now shut-down, website…download is below the description…)

When I started my company, I became very involved in the company marketing and public relations efforts. In the process, I realized that a lot of techniques that go into promoting and building a small business can be very effective for individuals who are looking for a job and want to increase their professional value whether or not they are currently employed.

Working out of my home office forced me to look for opportunities that would allow me to grow as a professional while increasing my value as an expert in the field. I developed these techniques and implemented them very successfully for myself and my business. Now, I want to share with you how to use this information and techniques for your professional development.

The Successful Unemployment Toolkit™ that I have created for scientists and engineers is a set of very specific steps that you can start implementing immediately.

I will show you step-by-step how to:

· Add more valuable credentials and skills to your resume, even if you are not officially employed (and I am not talking about taking more classes or going back to school)

· Stay on top of the latest research developments in your field, whether or not you are currently working

· Stand out from the crowd of thousands of other job applicants, even if they have more experience in the field or a higher degree than you

· Develop the skills that will get you hired

· Find opportunities for professional growth

· Uncover jobs that are not advertised

· And most importantly - How to feel professionally fulfilled and HAPPY

DOWNLOAD Part 1 (zip file that includes Tracks 1-5 in mp3 format): mvpmodelingsolutions.com/Tracks_1_through_5_mp3.zip

DOWNLOAD Reference Guide in pdf format: mvpmodelingsolutions.com/ReferenceGuide_2011.pdf

Cheers!

Masha

Dear MVP Readers,

Happy 2011 to all of you! Hope you had a wonderful holiday season.  This is a quick video asking for your input for future interviews on this blog (some ideas : writing government grants, getting started with government consulting, pitching your book idea to a publishing company) .

Here are the new American Chemical Society courses  mentioned in the video:

Essentials of Chemical Kinetics:

http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=KNWEB

Chemistry for Non-chemists

http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=CHWEB

Intro to Statistical Analysis of Lab Data

http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=STWEB

Ahhhh… the Holiday Season…Every year around this same time a slew of  “experts on gift-giving” come out with numerous super-ultimate gift lists for mothers, fathers, friends, teachers, babysitters and hairdressers. But when was the last time you’ve seen a great gift giving guide for all of the Engineers in your life?

I have yet to see such a guide. So I am self-proclaiming myself as a gift-expert for scientists and engineers this season! Here is the SUPER-ULTIMATE Gift Guide for every engineer, scientist, and techie-in-general on your list. Enjoy!

(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the companies below and am not compensated for any of the product suggestions. I own MVP Modeling Solutions.)

SUPER-ULTIMATE Gift Guide

For your co-workers:

Working with Engineers? Thank them for their great work and attention to detail with:

Neocube 216pc Magnet Puzzle

It’s a fun magnetic puzzle that anyone working in front of a computer all day would appreciate! It looks cool sitting on your desk and keeps you entertained while you’re procrastinating… I mean, brainstorming.

$19.95 from www.Amazon.com

Click here to see the cool video of the puzzle.

For your lab mates:

Need a creative gift for a biologist or chemist that will actually help them work better? Get them a stylish looking Molecular Model Set. They are fun to tinker with while…uuuhhmmm…brainstorming, they look cool AND make you look smart while sitting on your desk.

$31.50 from www.Amazon.com

Piled Higher and Deeper comics are an oldie but goody. Created by a Stanford engineering graduate it kept me entertained though out grad school years and students and advisors alike can still empathize with the comic strip’s characters.

For your thesis advisor:

If you are a grad student, praying for graduation - give a small token of appreciation to your advisor! Every little bit helps.

World’s Best Advisor Mug

$12.95 PhD Comics Store

For your friends who are desperate to get out of grad school and start living:

Grad Student Motivation Chart Mug

$12.95 PhD Comics Store

For any of your Techie friends having to survive in the corporate world:

Of course we can not forget about Dilbert as we think of our “could-be” researchers who have sold their souls to the corporate world (yes, that would be me).

Make them a Customized Dilbert gift!

1)      Choose favorite character

2)      Select your favorite comic strip

3)      Choose to print the strip on a mug, card, t-shirt of water bottle

For anyone in the STEMs fields:

Entertaining t-shirts from www.thinkgeek.com. Here are some of my favorites:

T-shirt with a built-in equalizer. Animates to ambient noise or music. $29.99

Stand back t-shirt: Staring at $15.99

Molar Mole t-shirt: (it’s made out of repeated Avogadro’s number!) Staring at $15.99

For your HR, procurement of training manager:

Last but not least, remember that your HR and procurement departments can be helpful in letting you know about various opportunities in the company. Make their job easier by helping them spend company training budgets on courses that engineers would enjoy and managers would approve off:

MVP Courses now on sale! Choose from chemistry, chemical-kinetics and engineering modeling courses.

Students - help the people in charge of seminars and talks at your university. Suggest they look into the entertaining and valuable MVP Keynote talks.

Hope this gift guide will help take care of every engineer and scientist on your list.

Very Happy Holidays!

Masha

Hi Readers,

I wanted to share with you one of my experiences on improving personal productivity. Like many of you, I tend to feel that I have waaay too much on my plate when it comes to work tasks. A few years ago I had to start figuring out how to stop feeling like I was getting nowhere, and to actually start accomplishing stuff. Below is one of my solutions.

If you constantly feel that there are never enough hours in the day to get things done, this post might be of use to you.

——————————————————————————————————

A few years ago I was working on a tech-support e-mail to an important client of the software company where I was working at the time. The customer sent us a lengthy e-mail complaining of numerous bugs that plagued the latest software version. Most of his complaints were a result of his own ignorance, but being in charge of the company’s technical support program I had to be very delicate in my e-mail response.

Right in the middle of the writing process a “Ping!” sound chimed from my PC. Outlook has dutifully informed me of an incoming e-mail message. I stopped writing in mid-sentence and checked the Inbox. My boss needed an “urgent” answer to an engineering question for a client. I typed up a response and attempted to get back to my client e-mail.

In order to regain my train of thought, I had to re-read the first part of my response and then spend about 3 more minutes remembering what I was planning on writing next. It took a total of 5 minutes to get back into the grove of writing. I managed to create another sentence when “Ping!!” Outlook yet again notified me of another in-coming e-mail.

Being a dutiful employee I never ignored e-mails. So interrupting my thought process for the second time, I popped open my inbox. It was one of the developers asking how to deal with a particular request from marketing. I sent him a quick reply and got back to my client e-mail. After yet another 5 minutes of re-grouping and re-focusing on the task at hand, I was off and running. But not for long… “Ping!!!” Outlook was once again demanding my attention. To make a long story short, Outlook interrupted me about four more times. The task of responding to a client e-mail, which should only have taken 15-30 minutes at the most, ended up taking me over 2 hours to complete, due to Outlook’s “You have mail!” reminder.

I would like to tell you that this was an exception rather than the norm, but that would be lying. Important work tasks were constantly interrupted by the “Ping!” of Outlook and things that should have taken me minutes to finish ended up taking hours. At the time,

I did not think that there was anything wrong with this system. Whoever contacted me would get a reply within minutes, which only demonstrated that I was a stellar employee.

That was until I read The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss (the new 2009 edition is now in bookstores). Ferriss explained that current typical workplaces are designed to promote employees wasting a lot of time on trivial tasks, which prevent them from accomplishing things that really matter to their career, happiness, and life. Tasks that should take minutes to complete take hours and sometimes days.

“Well, of course,” you might think, “that’s because you’re accomplishing other things along the way! You’re responding to other e-mails, calls, etc!” The problem is that many of those “other e-mails and calls” could be ignored. For example, did you really need to respond to a funny Youtube video from your co-worker?

Of course, there might be instances where the Youtube video is actually funny and co-worker that sent it to you is also a friend and you might WANT to respond to it. In this case you should batch it along with any other non-urgent e-mails. Ferriss’ concept behind e-mail batching is that you conduct all of your e-mail conversations at 1 or 2 specific times per day, eliminating e-mail interruptions during important tasks and thus becoming much more effective in managing your workload.

After reading Ferriss’ book I decided to give this idea a try. I showed up to work and took the following steps, following Ferriss’ advice.

Step 1: Turn off Outlook alert for new e-mails. No alert = no need to interrupt an important task at hand. I realize that some of you might be “on-call” and expected to respond to e-mails immediately. What if your boss has an emergency question during a client meeting? Or a co-worker needs your help immediately? Although let’s face it, there are very few “emergencies” that really can’t wait a few hours. For those types of emergences I would request that people contact me via my cell phone (see below).

Step 2: Turn off automatic e-mail send/receive option. This turned out to be extremely useful not just for increasing my productivity but for developing my people skills as well. How many times have you sent an angry e-mail, regretting it minutes later? This step allows you to write all of your e-mails at specifically allocated time. This way, you can digest whether or not to really send the not-so-great e-mail. A number of times, after turning off the auto send/receive option, I ended up going back to my e-mail drafts and re-writing or deleting them completely. It was a relief that Outlook did not actually send the e-mails until I had sometime to think about them.

Step 3: Check/respond to e-mail only twice a day. Granted, not all of you might be able to get away with this step at your workplace, but you can probably get away with some version of it. If you feel that your workplace truly cares about productivity and effectiveness of its employees you can create an e-mail auto-response to train those around you to be more effective with your time.

Below is an example of an auto-responder that I set up, following guidelines recommended by Ferriss. It worked for about a day, until my boss said that although he appreciates my goal of being more productive I should probably get rid of the auto-responder and simply check e-mail twice a day without it declaring that fact to the world. That worked for me.

If your workplace is truly interested in having you solve engineering problems and contribute to the bottom line in the fastest and most effective way, your co-workers would understand if you are not checking your e-mail during that time.

Here is an example of an auto-responder (for more examples see The Four Hour Workweek):

Dear Colleagues,

Due to high workload, I am currently checking and responding to e-mail twice daily at 12PM and 4PM EST.

If you require urgent assistance, please call my cell: 555-555-5555. Thank you for helping me become more efficient and effective. It will help me to serve you better!

Best,

Masha

At first, I was terrified of missing important e-mails. I was nervous about how the rest of my coworkers would respond after receiving my auto-responder. Surprisingly, the transition towards eliminating the most important work interruption went very smoothly.

Although the auto-responder idea did not fly at that particular workplace, I simply started checking my e-mail twice a day. And no disasters happened. The earth did not crack open and the sky did not fall. But I did become a heck a lot more productive with projects that really mattered.

How much better would your work and personal life be if you could accomplish truly important work goals in half the time? The three above steps for eliminating e-mail interruptions might be just the answer.

Try them out and let us all know how it worked in the comments below!

Masha

Today’s college students are increasingly scientifically illiterate.

Yes, I said it. This statement might upset you if you are a college student or professor, but you might likely agree with it if you are an engineering manager in charge of new hires.

If you do a bit of searching and speak to some technical book publishers, you’ll find that it is universally agreed that traditional teaching methods (including textbooks, lectures, and pages of homework problems) are becoming increasingly less attractive to today’s students and especially fail with underrepresented populations in science and engineering.

There has to be a way to address this problem. Last year I wrote a post On Teaching where I talked about my experiences with Socratic Method of teaching vs. the traditional lecture.

Because of my involvement with the Franklin Foundation, I had a chance to think a bit more about the issues that face the current state of our science education. I decided that just encouraging educators to use the Socratic Method, is not enough. Aside from the fact that less students are motivated to major in engineering and sciences, those that do, simply do not learn all that much.

A number of studies, such as Why We Must Change: The Research Evidence, by L.F. Gardiner, found that only about 20% of what is taught in a traditional university course is retained by the students. In rare cases that number can be as high as 50%. Meaning that in a traditional university course, 50-80% of instructor’s and students’ time is completely wasted! I do not believe it has to be this way. There is a way increase the amount of information that students retain, whether in class or while doing homework, and I think that can be accomplished with the help of video games.

Although this is not a novel idea, the research on benefits of video games for education purposes is barely getting underway. In 2003, BBC did a piece on how even the action-packed shooting games develop players’ strategic thinking (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2744449.stm). We know that problem-solving and strategic thinking are closely related and are necessary in learning scientific principles.

USA Today ran an article in 2005 on video games as potential treatment of ADD (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/games/2005-09-26-video-game-therapy_x.htm). People with ADD tend to be more creative and have shorter attention spans and, generally, tend not to go into disciplines like engineering. Perhaps incorporating video games into engineering curriculum can change that.

There have been a number of attempts at creating a more “active” learning environment in the engineering education community. From what I’ve seen, most of these attempts resulted in very sad power-point presentations with some movies thrown in, and few complicated and bland computer “games” that much more resembled designing a machine part in CAD software, than playing a Play Station game.

Why do I think that science and engineering students will be able to learn better and retain more information by playing video games than by reading a book?

Since humans began to evolve as a species, they have been conducting experiments in order to learn about the world around them. As babies, we constantly taste things, touch things, and throw things so we can understand how they work. As teenagers, we push the limits of our parents’ sanity and try things we shouldn’t try because that is how we learn.

Somewhere in the establishment of our higher education system, the natural tendency of humans to learn by experimentation was stifled. Students are expected to passively sit through hundreds of lecture hours, read about experiments that have been done in the past, or at best, conduct very controlled and predictable experiments in one a few lab courses, stripped of any creativity. A carefully designed video game environment will bring into the classrooms that creative experimentation that allows us to learn so well as humans, without the massive costs associated with laboratory expenses.

Video games thus make it possible to “learn by doing” without making huge investments into elaborate laboratory space and equipment. (That is not to say that all physical experimentation is absolute. Only that a lot more learning should be done via experimentation and video games can allow doing so affordably).

If you think about it, learning via gaming would change the educational focus from passive learning (as in traditional teaching methods) to actively engaging students in the learning process by providing highly simulative, entertaining, and focused learning environment.

Rather than looking at Power Point slides or watching a movie about past experiments, students should be able to create their own experiments, while learning the underlying scientific principles.

I believe that incorporating video games into science and engineering educational curriculum will increase the quality of our scientists and engineers by greatly increasing the retention of technical information learned in school, attracting non-traditional engineering students, and by expanding the student’s minds by stimulating their creative and innovative thinking.

What you think? Do you agree or disagree? Where to you think we should go from here? Would love to hear your thoughts! Please comment below.

Hi MVP Readers,

As promised, here is my “Where has Masha been” video. Please forgive the video editing quality - I am still trying to get the hang of it. Turns out that using Windows Movie Maker is a complete nightmare. If anyone has a suggestion for a better video editing software for Windows XP,  please let me know in the comments!

In this video: My summer 2010 update, TurboExpo, Costa Rica, new book and new ACS courses!

- Description of my 2 hour TurboExpo presentation is here (page 34) http://www.asmeconferences.org/te10/pdfs/TE10_FinalProgram.pdf

-Upcoming ACS courses:

–Essentials of Chemical Kinetics

http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=KNWEB

–Computer Simulation of  Reactive Flows

http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=RFWEB

–Chemistry for non-chemists

http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=CHWEB

All the Best!

Masha

Dear Readers,

Very sorry for such a long absence from this blog! I recently came back from an ACS (American Chemical Society) speaking tour, which was a very interesting and enriching experience for me. Currently, I am working on a couple of potential book proposals as well. There might be an upcoming opportunity for you to contribute to a book on a subject related to chemical kinetics and computer modeling. So stay tuned!

This was the first time I have gone on an ACS speaking tour and it was a very interesting experience. I would recommend it to anyone looking to grow as a professional in a technical field.

This is how the volunteer speaker service works: ACS puts together a list of experts in various chemical fields who would like to volunteer to be traveling speakers. Various ACS local sections then go through the list and choose which speakers they would like to invite to a specific local meeting.

If you are one of the speakers who has selected by a particular group of local sections (a circuit), you get to travel around that area for a week and present a new talk each day in a new location. I did not realize that the more options for talk topics you provide, the more likely are the chances of various locations picking different topics . So I ended up giving 6 talks in 5 days on 4 different topics. My circuit covered a good portion of Wisconsin, which turns out to be a relatively large state, so I had 3- 5 hours of driving in between different locations.

In case you’re interested, here is what my schedule looked like:

Monday, April 19, 2010

Location: La Crosse, WI

Venue: University of Wisconsin - La Crosse

Topic: Economic Crisis and the Need for Computer Modeling

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Location: Milwaukee, WI

Venue: ACS Annual meeting

Topic: 10 Ways to Increase Your Value

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Location: Appleton, WI

Venue: Lawrence University

Topic: A Wife, a Mother, and a PHD

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Location: Stevens Point, WI

Venue: ACS meeting + university campus talk

Topic : A Wife, a Mother, and a PHD and Economic Crisis and the Need for Computer Modeling

Friday, April 23, 2010

Location: Houghton, MI

Topic: Importance of Perception - Why You Should Care About What Others Think

During each presentation I had a completely different audience. One day it was a large group of students. Another day it was a small mix of professors and graduate researchers. Yet another day I presented to a mixture of chemists from industry and academia.

One of my favorite audiences was in Eau Clair, where I presented the “Computer Modeling” talk to a group of retired industry chemists. Considering that half of my audience has never used a computer for so much as e-mail, it was an interesting presentation. But I have to say the retired chemists were one of the most inquisitive and interested audiences I had on this trip!

Going into the talk I had a bit of a panicky moment. Some of these people have been doing experiments in the lab for longer than two of my lifetimes. How in the world was I going to explain to them that we are on the path of moving more and more of these experiments into this teeny box called a “computer”?!

Amazingly, my audience stayed curious and interested through the whole talk. Afterwards, some of the listeners shared a few stories about how back in the day, you had to use stacks of punch cards to program just a few lines of code. Maybe because the have seen such evolution of science and technology over their lifetimes, the idea of more and more experiments being done virtually, inside of a computer did not seem surprising to them.

Now if only I can have such an open-minded audience at TurboExpo next month!

I am thoroughly disturbed. I just finished browsing through the technology magazine section of my local Barnes & Noble. A common theme ran through most of the magazine articles that I found rather unnerving.

“Can we trust robots? New models that will talk, act and look like humans…why experts are worried.” in Popular Mechanics.

“The mind readers – Scientists who can pluck images from your head” and “Cyborg Spy-Bugs! Terrifying Science or Innocent research?” in Popular Science.

“Robots – real-life androids that fight wars and save lives” in How it Works.

I realize that these are not peer-reviewed scientific publications, but the information in these magazines does reflect the state of current technology research. This, to me, makes reading about computers that can hack into our minds, remote control robots the size of an ant, and artificial intelligence that can mimic human thought, rather creepy. Read more »

Last week I had a typical conversation with a potential client. After the engineer described a problem his company was having, the conversation went something like this:

Potential client (PC): “Great! You do have an impressive background and you’re right – we have a lot of gaps that you can help us fill.”

Me: “It helps to have a pair of expert eyes look over your R&D processes.”

PC: “That makes sense. We worked with consultants before and were amazed how much time they saved us! How much would your services cost?”

Me: Describe various services. Give a range of very reasonable prices.

PC: “Oh…well the budgets are tight, the economy is bad…no one has money…I think we will try to do this in-house…”

Me: “Haven’t you been trying to do this in-house for a while now?”

PC: “Well yeah, but the budgets are really tight…so we’ll try to do it ourselves… We’ll call some vendors, read some technical papers…”

Me: “How long do you think that process will take you?”

PC: “Well, probably much longer than if you were working with us…”

Me: “And how much do you estimate that time would cost?”

PC: “Well, since we’ll just be using in-house engineering time, it would not cost us anything.”

Me: “????!!”

Read more »

Just a side note: we have been getting some wonderfull comments from all of you on current AND older posts. I try to respond to all, or at least most, of your comments. If you posted comments here previously, I highly encourage you to check back on those posts to see what responses you recieved.

Get latest updates from Twitter: Twitter.com/MVPetrova

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“I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!–Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.

…I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

Read more »