[I seem to have lost all of the term papers I did while a grad student at the College of William & Mary from Fall 1988 to Spring 1989 except for this one. This was the first paper written for a class AmSt 602 taught in the Fall of 1988 by Professor Stanfield. The full title was “The Autobiography of an Ex-Engineer: A Lesson in Creative Problem-Solving,” dated 13 September 1988. (One of the other papers I did for this class I remember was an interesting comparison between Clifford Geertz’s Balinese cockfight and Hoosier basketball.) In looking over the paper I seem to be reaching out to Professor Stanfield to see if he could help me figure out how to crack this academic nut. I don’t think he quite knew what to do with me. I see that his only comment on the paper was a rather cryptic “Don’t forget, ambivalence is a central norm in academic life.” I guess he was trying to tell me that he couldn’t help me!]
If my parents had wanted to raise a creative problem-solver, they could not have done a better job. Their first child, I was born 22 November 1956. My father, an electrical engineer who had graduated at the top of his class from Tulane University, did not just want a normal, healthy, well-educated child. He wanted an exceptional child – one who would accomplish great things. He devoted whatever free time he had to reading books and putting into practice theories on hastening the intellectual development of the infant. He taught me how to read when I was four. After starting school he would always keep me a couple of steps ahead of the teacher – I’m sure to the complete frustration of my teachers – in mathematics and science. My father taught me to question my teachers and not accept things at face value. His patient methodical and individualized approach to teaching, and his appreciation of the rational, analytical method of solving problems, helped make me a “good little engineer.”
As important as my father was to my early development, my mother undoubtedly played just as big a role. My total way of thinking is very much a combination of the two. Whereas my father is only at home in the physical world of engineering, my mother is adept in most areas of intellectual pursuit. (After 25 years as a housewife, she returned to college and graduated with a 4.0 average in Accounting at the University of Houston Clear Lake). In contrast to my father, my mother is quick, emotional, and intuitive. Although she was busy raising my sister and brother when I was very young, she would later take over the greatest role in my educational development during my later grade school years. She introduced me to more creative approaches to solving problems, especially in English and social studies.
As much as my development and intentional on the part of my parents, many aspects of my personality were beyond their control. My father’s early encouragement, while it helped me to become an excellent analytical problem-solver, could just as easily have turned me into a neurotic over-achiever. My creativity was not born out of any parental training, but simply out of the freedom I was given to explore my environment. Only by allowing the child to explore his world in his own way can a child ever develop true creativity. This freedom was unavoidable – my father was at school or work and my teenage mother was totally unprepared for having three children in quick succession. Her eldest child, whom my grandmother called “a holy terror,” just could not be controlled. I would get into everything and anything. Combined with the loving nurturance I received from my parents throughout my childhood, this freedom helped give me the self-confidence I would need to survive in a world where conformity – not creativity – is the key to survival.
Little can be said about schools in my development. Schools are not conducive to creative problem-solving. It is much more important to do as the teacher says and show all of the steps. Many creative problem-solvers, if not given enough support at home, are quickly squashed in schools. The only way to survive is for the creative child to devote his focus to the one art that is appreciated: test-taking. I became very good at test-taking.
The college atmosphere is hardly more conducive to creative problem-solving. Class discussions and term paper composition allow some room for creativity within limits, but the atmosphere is more one of toleration rather than encouragement.
When I graduated from Texas A&M University with a degree in Chemical Engineering in May 1977, I went to work for ARCO at a large oil refinery in Houston. I was not at all sure how I could use my talents in the “real world.” Luckily (as it turned out) I was assigned to a position in energy conservation (coming as a result of the high energy prices following the Yom Kippur War and OPEC oil embargo), a newly created post that my supervisor, Bruce C. Foster, left me free to define. Unsure of how I should start, I initially devoted my time to learning as much as I could about how things worked in the refinery. I submerged myself in detail trying to see if there was anything I could possibly do.
After I had been struggling a few months in this direction, I received some very helpful advice from Harry Kent, a retired energy conservation consultant from DuPont whom ARCO had hired. Sensing that I needed some help, he took me on a tour of the refinery, pointing out some of the many ways and places that energy was wasted. Rather than solve everything at once, he suggested that I just work with individual problems and eventually everything will fall into place. I had mistakenly been thinking that the “real world” was somehow different from school, above being questioned, that all of the easy problems had already been solved and what improvements that could yet be made would be difficult to find. Not so! Following up the Harry’s advice, the next day I went out and identified an innocuous operating practice that was costing the refinery a million dollars a year in wasted energy. I couldn’t believe my calculator! Why hadn’t anyone identified this problem before? Because it had always been done that way.
Assuming that problems were everywhere, all I had to do was look for them. Nobody had trained me for this kind of work. This was much more problem creation than problem solution, for I was finding problems where none were known to be. The job demanded creativity because each problem was different. A holistic attitude was demanded because many of the problems were cancerous and interconnected throughout the refinery. Creative and holistic are adjectives quite foreign to engineering.
Gradually I realized that I had the uncanny ability to solve problems with which I was totally unfamiliar, in areas totally unrelated to energy conservation. Rather than solving problems using inductive or deductive logic, I was relying on intuition: a super-logic that was going on inside my head faster than I could explain, the creative problem-solving I had been doing since I was a child. When I tried to train people to take over my job so that I could move onto other things after two years of doing energy conservation, I found it impossible for even the brightest young engineers to understand how I created and solved problems. Each problem was different and ill-suited to a standard method.
I relieved heavily on my physical senses, actually going out to the place where there was a suspected problem and just walking and looking around. I would talk to anybody who might possibly be able to help me. (Many young engineers are afraid they will show their ignorance if they enlist help in solving problems.) Sometimes I would stare at schematic diagrams for hours or plot data on paper that I would tack up all around my office. Eventually an idea would strike me and, with persistence, I would follow through until I tested its validity.
In the “real world,” creativity is neither discouraged nor encouraged. There really is only one criterion: does it work? Because I was successful, my creativity was allowed to flourish. As might be expected, my creativity did not find friends everywhere. Many traditional conservative elements were threatened and were angered at my ability to go over their heads to more far-seeing supervisors. However, my level of success convinced many people to at least give my ideas a shot.
Eventually, though, I began knocking my head against too many walls as I moved more and more to major design projects which were totally outside of the scope of the work being done in the refinery. I was not at all suited to supervisory work and I did not want to sit in some stuffy office doing research-and-design (R&D) work, so they did not really know what to do with me. A year after I left the refinery to take a job in Alaska, the refinery in Houston had five engineers doing the job I alone had been doing.
Unfortunately this fantastic work experience spoiled me. Not only had I been allowed to spread my wings intellectually but the work I had done – energy conservation – seemed somehow important to me. Subsequent opportunities for me were very much like doing the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle: initially challenging but eventually I would ask myself, “Why am I doing this?” To make money or because it is intellectually stimulating just was not a satisfactory answer. I was able to save enough money in Alaska to “retire” in 1982 and then I tried different lifestyles. I travelled around the world a couple of times, lived on a commune in India, taught middle and high school science in an Alaska “bush” village school, lived in England for a year, and traced my family roots. Each fascinated me for awhile, and would lead me to new interests, but each time I would have to ask myself: “Why am I doing this?”
Gradually maturity has snuck up on me and I have decided it is time for me to settle down. My wife and I are expecting our first baby in October and I know this will change my life forever. As much as I have resisted it, the only place it seems where I can possibly fit in is academia. I would very much like to use my talents to do something important, something that will make the world a better place to live – I have always been a romantic idealist. But I accept the realities of academia and believe I can work within its rules – it is just like test-taking. I know my biggest problem will be the same as when I first entered the refinery – learning how to get started. Hopefully there will be someone like that retired energy conservation consultant who will be able to point me in the right direction.