Reviving the mentor mentality

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.