[SBE] In Need of Mentoring

[Thomas Shanks]

I think that there is too little pride in one's work, too little love of excellence, and too little willingness to study and endeavor exhaustively until the job is done right.  We are supposed to be professionals.  That doesn't mean making sure the most expensive hardware it purchased.  That means ensuring you've done the best work you can using the collective knowledge of the art and the resources you've been provided, while sharing what you learn with the industry.  It means standing on the shoulders of the giants before you and making a discovery you share with those that will follow.  I try to be an "email mentor" to the college broadcasting circles, and now hope to share (bi-directionally, of course) with the public radio and broadcast engineering.

My book training is an EE and a CS degree from Georgia Tech.  Simultaneously, I taught myself Broadcast Engineering as the Chief Engineer of WREK Atlanta, Georgia Tech Student Radio.  GT doesn't teach any of this themselves, sadly, nor do they provide class credit for my work.

I would love to teach the principles, practice (to the degree I know it), and will of software (programming, replacement of humans with shell scripts), hardware (repair and design), radio frequency (transmitter repair, antenna selection, FCC filings, etc), audio (studio sound, processing, acoustics, wiring), and integration (major rebuild projects) broadcast engineering, but none of the students here want to learn.

Or maybe they just want a different kind of resume fodder that involves a paycheck, and this work isn't to their liking.

Either way, I'm here ready to teach this to the next person willing to take my chair for three or four years.  This sort of deep design-it-yourself experience is what they'll need to work for those manufacturers when they need to make the next engineer-replacing hardware, to tell the truth.  Send 'em my way.

Thomas Shanks CBRE
Chief Engineer (and Graduate Student)
WREK Atlanta, Georgia Tech Student Radio