Live and Learn on Purpose.
Couldn’t resist the song reference – Maurice is my middle name. It’s the start of the semester, which means I recently met several hundred new people. Every time, I face a challenge: a student will ask me what I prefer to be called and I […]
My graduate advisor, the late Dr. Walter O’Brien, rarely told me stories from his personal life. However, after I expressed concerns over my own future, he shared with me a little of his own past. Graduate school takes a lot of work and seems to […]
“We want you to come, Tony.” I’d just been offered a job that would mean leaving my current position, packing up, and moving my family across the country. What started a few months earlier as “just looking around” had become a very real, and very […]
25 applications and 26 interviews. That’s the story I’ve been telling for years. When I first entered the job market after my post-doc, I applied to 100 jobs. The problem was that I got zero phone calls for interviews. Zero. When no one contacted me, I […]
I recently made the decision to change jobs (and states). Interestingly enough, at age 34, this is the first time the decision was mine to make. This post reflects on that experience, and I hope it will help you see that sometimes the best thing […]
After three amazing years as a mechanical engineering professor at Temple University, I’m excited to announce that I’ve accepted a new faculty position at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas! This is an amazing opportunity to expand on what I’ve been doing at Temple, and […]
“How do we stop people from texting while they drive?” I remember the speaker asking this question during a seminar on creative problem solving like it was yesterday. The audience instantly jumped into brainstorming mode, listing solutions such as “automatically lock phones over a certain […]
The first thing I can remember borrowing real money for (other than student loans) is a TV. I followed this with a brand new car, a furniture set, a vacation, and (my favorite) the moving bill to move all of that stuff across the country. […]
This past weekend my mother-in-law was kind enough to buy me a few shirts as a gift. Their purpose? Something to wear while rock climbing, running, hiking, and other outdoor activities. They’re made of specially-engineered materials that wick away sweat, dry quickly, inhibit odor, and […]
We made it: it’s summer!!!!!! Here’s a season where everyone gets a chance to let off the gas a little bit and recover from the grind that the first months of every year seem to hold. I’d like to offer you a bit of advice […]
