Michael Ivanovich

Reviving the mentor mentality
February 12, 2008

Terry Brennan came into the Solar 101 classroom at Utica, N.Y-based Mohawk Valley Community College, in 1980, sat on the teacher’s desk, pulled off his sweater, looked around the room, noticed each of us, and said, “I’m going to teach you from the Book of Solar.” Thus began a typical teacher/student relationship that eventually became a mentor/mentee relationship, which evolved into a lifelong friendship that today is as strong as ever.

Terry’s career is remarkable. He went from working as a home builder to home designer, and then from a solar energy and energy-efficiency expert to a radon mitigation pioneer. In his current manifestation, he is an IAQ and sustainability guru. Here's a link to his company, Camroden Associates, in upstate New York.

I followed along, learning and contributing as I could, as a computer scientist and then as a building scientist. At one time, I worked for him, sitting at a desk in a basement office that featured a home-built wind tunnel (for testing the performance of stack caps), a laboratory for testing assemblies and calibrating sensors and instruments, and an incredible library. With these resources and Terry’s guidance, I learned building science and how to perform building diagnostics, using everything from a blower door and tracer gas set-up to a smoke puffer and an ostrich feather. One of Terry's lessons that stuck with me pertained to how complex systems really are in life because of environmental, mechanical, and human interactions: "If you want to know, you have to measure. If you want to get really confused, measure twice."

I moved up from his basement, knowledgeable and confident enough to earn a graduate degree in engineering (with a solar emphasis) and work as a research assistant and scientist with three different national laboratories. The first of these jobs was at Los Alamos National Laboratory; Terry provided what was undoubtedly the key reference (I got the job).

From Terry, I also learned how to conduct business with a service mentality. People whom he never met and probably never would called Terry to ask advice. He’d freely give more time than I knew he had. And there were times when I‘d hear him give his ideas and methodologies away to “competitors.” I asked him about that once, and he said, “There’s enough work for everyone, and it’s important to get the good ideas into practice. I can’t do everything that’s in my head.”

This kind of mentoring in the engineering profession used to be very strong, or so I’ve heard from the old-timers bemoaning the loss of mentoring. To help cultivate more mentoring in the engineering profession, Consulting-Specifying Engineer is publishing a series of mentoring articles—beginning with two in February—on mentoring. A myth-busting article by Amy Smith, PhD, an expert on adult learning and education, describes mentoring models and motivations for all engineering fields begins the series. The series eventually will cover electrical, fire, HVAC, green buildings, and lighting. February kicks off the technical mentoring articles with electrical engineering; it was authored by Landis Floyd, principal consultant, DuPont, and focuses on safety-center electrical-systems design.  We are compiling this series into a book at the end of the year. I will provide links to these articles from here as they are posted on line.

Please read these articles, and feel free to send us letters describing your mentors, your search for one, or your experiences as a mentor. We’d like to run these as letters to the editor or add these to the book, with your permission. I can be contacted via email at michael.ivanovich@reedbusiness.com.

Posted by Michael Ivanovich on February 12, 2008 | Comments (0)