Mechanical Engineer Résumé Objective Statements

Last Tuesday was my final day at Maxwell AFB, AL, forever.  At least, that's if I have my way.  A few people hinted that I might be invited back to be on the staff or as rotating help next year, but A) I'll probably be out of the military and B) I'm not sure I ever want to go back and do that.  Oddly enough, the experience was very rewarding but it was also very tiring, and without the right staff I could see the whole thing being one lump of terrible.

Tuesday was an unceremonious day.  All the staff was tired and ready to leave, so after we got the cadets on their buses we all pretty much looked at each other, nodded our heads, and went our separate ways.  The four of us that worked closely together, i.e. shared an office and about 80% of our waking hours for six weeks, did go out for breakfast, but we seemed to be the exception.  After eating my last southern breakfast for what I hope is a long time to come, I hit the road for twelve hours and back to a more civilized, if less fatty-delicious, part of the country.

I had the last two days off as comp time for being on more-or-less a deployment for the last month and a half, and I'll get some more time later this month.  No rest for the weary, however, because if I want to ensure that I don't go back to field training next year I need to find some permanent work.  Besides, coffee was made for weariness, and right now I'm having my fill as I work in the local Panera Bread (om nom).  I had to leave the house in order to get started today.  The fake bohemian in me, or fauxhemian, does tend to work better situated in a coffee shop of some sort.  "But Emerson," you say, "you're writing in your blag instead of building your résumé."  Truth--but it's all part of the process.

Like running, writing has a therapeutic, thought-organizing effect on my brain, I just wish I had the discipline to do it as often as I run.  People ask me what I think about while I run, and there's no good answer.  On the rare occasions I listen to music, sometimes I just think about that.  Often times I have a soundtrack running through my brain while running even without the headphones...annoyingly, sometimes that soundtrack is just one line of a song that repeats itself endlessly, or maybe just a word or phrase that gets stuck on a loop.  I have no idea why, but the scene in Kevin Costner's Waterworld where he talks about the language 'Portugreek' kept replaying itself over and over on my last few runs and also while I was fixing our Lazy Susan cabinet yesterday (zip-tie bodge-job FTW!).  But even if that's the case, even if I'm not actively considering something, when I'm done running, things seem to make more sense than when I left.  Maybe it's the repetitiveness or just the act of being active, but it puts me in a different mode.

So, as I wind this post to a close, I invite you to witness the transformation from creative silliness for pleasure to creative purpose-bent writing (barring, of course, the obvious fauxhemian concerns about existential absurdity and despair).  I submit to you the riskiest objective statements I can generate:

• Dynamic leader striving to break the second law of thermodynamics in a small system of employees using management experience and perpetual effort.
• High-velocity fluid engineer seeking elevated position at minimal head loss.
• Indefatigable stress test engineer looking to yield constructive destructive/non-invasive results for a no-limits company.
• Irreversible mechanical engineer looking to use vast stores of potential energy in the heating and cooling industry to do work close to the Carnot efficiency.
• Mechanical engineer looking for work in high-pressure industry where large λ will benefit bottom-line.

Man, I was hoping writing these down would make me less inclined to try and use them, but now they just seem like an even better idea.