Real World Constraints versus the Ivy Swimming Pool

 A certain college swimmer has been in the news for bending the rules, so it’s said. Not naming names, because anyone could have been the test case, switching from the Men’s to Women’s team without a significant interlude. Unnatural advantages are nothing new: earlier this century, the famous biker Lance Armstrong muddied the waters with his steroid use- apparently taking more than required for his medical condition. But what stands out, if I may say, is the swimmer’s sense of “due”. Sociologist Annette Lareau uses the term "entitlement" as a professional-class sense of belonging in a place, a term which I think has taken a negative connotation recently.

 In the Real World (that is, outside the literal Ivory Tower), prioritization and the acceptance of constraints is a fact of life. Two good things can be mutually exclusive: being a nationally-ranked Men’s Team Swimmer, regardless of gender identity, as this individual was; or receiving treatment for gender dysphoria. In mutual exclusivity, you do one thing first, then the other. The re-established three-year waiting period to switch teams, in the case of transgender players, may hobble a student-athlete’s athletic career, but delaying medical treatment for career or other ambitions is not out of the ordinary in the Real World.  

 For some mariners, including those on the high seas, it is impossible to complete a series of orthodontic treatment, while earning a paycheck: the location and time of shore leave is unpredictable, and not conducive to monthly appointments. For women mariners, the same constraints apply to fertility treatment; and if successful, non-seagoing work would have to be found for the duration of pregnancy. In my case, it took a year to find time to see a nasal specialist: when I was on a high-tempo ship, I relied on walk-in clinics, who could not give specialists’ referrals.  

Forgoing treatment, extending treatment (in the case of government mariners who work year-round), or skipping medication commonly seen as disqualifying for a safety-sensitive position, are all common in the shipping industry. We have come a long way, in some respects. It is no longer expected to work through an injury, or accept chronic pain “like a man”- an irony, as women have higher pain tolerance. Seeking mental health care is no longer a disqualifier for security work. Yet, for quality-of-life care, there remains a question of access, even if these people at sea and in other remote environments can afford it. This is what the Real World sees in the Ivy League swimmer’s case.   

PE Exam: Game Day

 

Most successful exam takers recommend doing nothing but relaxing the day before taking the 8-hour Professional Engineering exam. I ignored their advice. I had finished a practice exam the previous Saturday, but it was only on the day before test-day that I had time to rework missed problems.

Even on test day, between breakfast at the Holiday Inn Express and the test center opening, I ran through my flashcards with important formulae- rules of thumb- not included in the test handbook.  

I prepared snacks and lunch in portioned bags, placing them in my test candidate’s locker. Save brainpower for the test, instead of thinking about what to eat. In previous times, PE exam candidates, like lawyers aiming for the State Bar, would convene at certain convention-like centers around the state on a given day. Now, nearly all tests are offered at Pearson’s Professional Testing Centers, which serve members of various trades and professions, including nurses, EMTs, and dentists.

At least at the center I tested at, order of seating is given on a first-come, first-serve basis, so anxious individuals with a 2-hour exam could be seated ahead of full-day examinees. But there was a silver lining in the wait, as I decided to take my morning break early. If was fortuitous that I could plug-and-chug until lunchtime.

It had been several years since I sat for a major exam, so, like plunging into the cold water of the hotel pool, I remembered to mind my breathing and heart rate (My grad school program in Systems Engineering had no timed tests, just projects and reports).

Unlike most every other academic exam, the NCEES’ PE exam is a test that is about endurance, strategy, and time management. It is a test where perfection is erroneous, and where you are expected to skip questions to better manage time- an average of 6 minutes per question. Indeed, PhD’s are often permitted to skip this exam on the road to state licensure- their work is quite different from the constraints faced by ordinary practitioners of the engineering profession.

 I took the Mechanical- HVAC version, which errs towards the blue-collar side of the PE exams that NCEES offers. In this test, the writers want to ensure that someone long out of college, but dedicated to the industry, can pass the exam. I reviewed refrigeration questions from the US Coast Guard’s Marine Engineering test series, which is heavily focused on practical applications; several questions were direct hits.  

Each half of the test is about the same length in questions. But there is no cutoff clock for the first half, so you could pace 4 hours and 4 hours, or 3 hours and 5 hours between the halves. To reduce stress, I was not going to allot extra time to the first half of the exam, since the second half is traditionally the harder- and time-consuming half.

In the first half, I recall that I spent too much time on one question, then had to shoot-from-the hip on one I could have calculated. It resembled a practice problem, so I chose the answer from memory. It turned out the second half of the exam was the easier one, this cycle. (Four versions of the test are issued each year, and April 1 was the first day of a new test version). I definitely was dragging by question 75, out of 80, yet I had time to rework uncertain problems, and leave the test center 20 minutes ahead of time.

At the end of the exam, I had a high level of confidence, which waned with second-guessing myself the next day. A missed fundamental concept, such as confusing latent heat with sensible heat, could cost 7 questions, and the test-writers know which wrong answers to give as choices. One missed fundamental leaves little room for other errors, for the average-performing test taker. And of the fill-in-the-blank questions, what was the leeway given for rounding errors? The never specified the number of decimal points to give.

 With the computer-based test, I completed the exam on Friday, April 1, and received results on the following Wednesday. I couldn’t bear to see what I might see, but I saw the green bar of success! As I have completed all of the other state prerequisites for licensure (education, references, and an ethics exam), I am just waiting on the official letter to come from Richmond, VA.

As I sat on the tailgate of my car, having completed the test, I wondered at the feeling of having completed “the last test of your life”. For many of my undergraduate classmates at the US Merchant Marine Academy, comprehensive tests for the US Coast Guard Merchant Mariner License were the end of their academic careers. We had a profession for life, if sailing as a mariner is what we wanted.

Middle Managers That Weren't

 The 1940’s to the 1990’s were the golden age of middle management. World War Two was foisted upon a United States that still had a large agricultural population. To ensure quick learning for workers transitioning from farm to industry, it was necessary to break work into small tasks, with rigid supervision of personnel and production of reports. This method won the war.

The high overhead of this kind of supervision meant many jobs for middle managers, who often were picked from liberal arts colleges rather than the assembly line. As foreign countries built their industries along different management systems (such as Japanese quality control or German quality design), high overhead costs and large internal bureaucracy strangulated profits and ingenuity. 

To rework these byzantine processes and procedures, “re-engineering the corporation” meant re-evaluating the hierarchical organizational charts. Work once performed in narrow silos, (for example- clerks who processed one or two lines on a form) now became assigned to functional groups centered on a tangible result (customer satisfaction or widget-making machines repaired). Prospective management, which prevents employees from inducing errors; was replaced with less-costly retrospective management, which trusts the auditing process to find errors.

Middle management stood outside of the “value chain”, as found in Six Sigma theory; or the rolls of “essential workers” in the COVID-19 Pandemic. While the implementation of re-engineering created efficiency and return to profitability; the 1993 namesake book’s author, Michael Hammer, did not discuss what to do about displaced middle managers; or how the nascent internet would many first post-college jobs obsolete. Nor what to do about the continued rate of business and liberal arts majors graduating college each year; as college counsellors were late to the news.

Broken expectations are topics for a different day. Even if these graduates never reach the upper-middle class lifestyle, there is still a baseline consumption of goods and services; think food shelter, and medicine; which must be provided by essential workers. Those large student loans are a millstone on disposable income, whether it is to start a family or small business, or buy a home.

Many essential workers in the oft-forgotten “value chain” proclaim themselves “open to work”. They are commonly credentialed in multiple trades and professions; yet if they’re shipping war matériel to Europe, they aren’t available for offshore oil drilling. If they’re building houses, they aren’t available for over-the-road trucking. They are in-demand, and many are paid handsomely up-front; in contrast to the long-term payout envisioned by future middle managers. For whatever the reasons, vocational-focused colleges tend to be magnitudes more affordable than liberal arts colleges. 

How do you retool those middle-managers to become more essential, and to become part of the value chain? Some might cite the use of vocational aptitude tests, to determine that many people are not suited for manual labor, technical, or field work. But the experience of the military, through its promotion rates of Corporals and Petty Officers, shows that at least half of the population is suited for both labor and supervision; blue-collar and white-collar work (not just in today’s highly-selective military; but in Cold War times, when most volunteers were accepted for service). Occupational elitism is another concern: Would degreed construction managers lend a hand on the worksite?  

When colleges and non-essential businesses were closed during the heart of the Pandemic, I could see with my own eyes that many young adults rolled up their sleeves, and went to work on construction sites, as independent-contract delivery drivers, and as trade apprentices. If it was not just the ennui of boredom, the Invisible Hand of Economics finally did its work. Those college graduates will have some concrete skills to put on their resumes.