Job Title: Consultant and Trainer

Hi Sam,

I'm sorry that I didn't respond earlier but I only just now saw that Kathy forwarded your e-mail to the house. Hopefully I'm not too late, so here goes…

My business card reads "Quality Engineering and Applied Statistical Training". What that means is up to who's paying me. Most of my customers are large manufacturers but I generally work for their R&D or Engineering organizations. My time is split between actual consulting time and training, although the balance between the two varies a lot from place to place. For example, if I'm at STERIS who makes sterilization equipment for the surgical instruments (their machines look like funny dishwashers but their "soap" kills germs) I help them design experiments to determine how new and existing products work. Sometimes I work for GE and help them design light bulbs. I help them make decisions like how thick should the wire be for the filament. All of these activities involves lots of math equations and concepts.

All the stuff that I do isn't for work. You know that Kathy and I race our sailboat during the summer. Where we race all of the boats are different sizes and shapes so the races aren't fair. To make them fairer we measure how much time it takes each boat to complete a race (elapsed time that you would measure with your watch), and then we calculate a corrected time for each boat from the equation:

Corrected Time = Elapsed Time - Rating x Length

where Rating is a number assigned to each boat based on how fast the boat is and Length is the length of the race course. For example, our boat's rating is about 1 minute per mile. If we complete a 10 mile race in 2 hours (120 minutes) then our corrected time for the race is:

Corrected Time = 120 minutes - 1minute/mile x 10 miles = 110 minutes

We calculate corrected times for all of the boats and the boat with the lowest one is the winner. The problem is that the Ratings are not always fair to the boats so at the end of each racing season someone takes all of the race results and recalculates the Ratings. This might sound pretty easy but no one has a good way of doing it yet. Kathy and I have a new method we're working on, but that's been in our free time which we haven't had much of lately.

Regardless of who I'm working for, we're always measuring something. Sometimes the measuring instruments are pretty simple like tape measures, and other times the instruments are really fancy like laser gages. Regardless of where the meausrements come from you have to know what to do with the numbers. I do things like calculate averages (which you know about) and lots of other nasty things with bad names like standard deviation, and skewness, and kurtosis, and heteroskedasticity. These are just words invented by people who do my kind of work to scare the managers who have to pay us big $$$ to hear us say them. They really have simple meanings that I could show you with pictures, but that's too hard to do from the keyboard. You could learn about these things from a textbook, but the really good people are the ones who can interpret them and then tell normal people what to do about them. I guess that in general a consultant is someone who takes lots of information (numbers) and knows what's important and how to get as much value as possible from them for the people he's working for. Communication is what's really important. I probably spend 10-20 hours a week writing reports or presentations. My reading, writing, speaking, listening, and organization skills all have to be excellent for what I do. I have a friend who's much better at math than I am, but he can't do any of these other things so he's of no use to anyone.

Mathematics is really a beautiful thing but you have to have someone who can show you why. Hopefully you have a really good math teacher who can show you some of these things.

Oh, and more important for you is that there's more and more women doing math now. Kathy and my sister Lisa are both electrical engineers and do math all of the time and the woman who works for me, Rebecca, has her BS in Math. Rebecca wouldn't have the job if it wasn't for her math, statistics, and computer programming education and she can communicate by writing and speaking.

I hope this helps a little and that it's on time. As usual with me I've given a 20 minute answer to a 2 minute question. Let me know if I can help any more.

Love, Paul.