531: Sequestering the Mess

531: Sequestering the Mess
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Elecia and Christopher celebrate winning the IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education! A huge thank you to Mark Omo and the wonderful listeners who submitted nomination letters. Chris and Elecia talk about learning Hungarian to qualify Chris for an EU passport. They also cover Cory Doctorow's new book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, smart ways to hand off codebases, and the most valuable skills they’ve relied on through their engineering careers.

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Awards & Milestones:

"For creating and sustaining Embedded.fm, a long-running technical engineering podcast that bridges academic theory and industry practice, champions underrepresented groups in STEM, addresses professional ethics, and provides informal technical mentorship to a global audience."

Huge thanks to Mark Omo for submitting the nomination and to the other nominators for advocating for our work.

To the 450+ guests—artists, makers, educators, entrepreneurs, and traditional engineers—who have generously shared their time and deep expertise with us: this award belongs to you too.

And to our incredible global listener community: thank you for tuning in, sharing episodes with your colleagues, and keeping the STEM pipeline strong.

If Embedded.fm has ever helped you solve a tricky bug, navigate a career transition, or stay inspired in hardware/software design, we’d love for you to celebrate with us by sharing your favorite episode with an early-career engineer or student this week!

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Transcript

527: At The Jellyfish Conference

527: At The Jellyfish Conference
Embedded.fm
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Chris and Elecia talk about pushing out of their comfort zone, networking advice, adding STARs and action verbs to resumes, using rust, thermo forming plastics, soldering together audio gear, and winning awards. 

If you are looking for an update to your resume or are interviewing for a new job and you haven’t heard of the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result), it is a good way to formulate what you’ve done in a way that helps people see your impact. The Rutgers College Career Development Center has a STAR description that includes how to take your current, boring “did the task” resume bullet point and move it into STAR format and then into resume format to say “got great things done”. There are lots of examples of STAR in practice (ex 1, ex 2). We mainly talked about resumes but it is very useful for having coherent stories during interviews. (Search “STAR resume”, “STAR interview”, “STAR engineering” to find a presentation that works for you. The college career sites are probably the best ones I’ve found.)

On the topic of resumes, if you don’t know about resume action verbs, let us share some lists that will make writing your resume 25% less painful. Again, college career development centers have the best ones (Harvard Business School’s action verb list is good for managers, Penn State has a nice set of verbs for engineering or see University of Houston’s verb list for engineering.)

And on the topic of interviewing and networking, do you have an elevator pitch for yourself? A short introduction of who you are? It is really handy to have that for conferences as well. Princeton has a short write up on putting one together; UPenn has a long write up (ironic given the topic but still useful).

Will Chris be adding the Rust language to his resume? Too early to tell. He’s been learning with Rust for Embedded C Programmers - OpenTitan Documentation. 

Elecia has been playing with origami molded fabrics, as learned on Instructable Paper Mold Origami Fabrics 3.  The term on Instagram seems to be #plissage and it is covered in (super famous origami guy) Paul Jackson’s encyclopedic Complete Pleats. 

Chris has built a Colour Duo 2-Channel Colour Channel Strip Kit (a preamp with modifiable analog processing). This kit is from DIY Recording Equipment. He’s enjoying working with it while recording music. 

After Elecia’s New Year’s Resolution to apply for awards, we won a Communicator Award for Individual Episodes-Science & Technology, Distinction 2026 for an episode about engineering the landscape of fear and conservation technology in the wild: 501: Inside the Armpit of a Giraffe. This was quite the honor but after some consideration, we are even more honored to be nominated by listeners for the IEEE Educational Activities Board (EAB) Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education. This award “recognizes IEEE members who volunteer their time and effort to improve the informal education community, helping to promote engineering to students, parents, and the general public.”

Having fulfilled the objective and gone beyond, Elecia is still planning to apply for the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards where we’ll need to find one or two episodes from July 2025 to July 2026 that show off “scientific accuracy, initiative, originality, clarity of interpretation, and value in fostering a better public understanding of science and its impact.”

Transcript