Category: General

My latest article in the Phelps County Focus, published January 10, 2024. Here’s a teaser:

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For about a decade, I have gone elk hunting every year with my friend Wayne, who has been hunting elk for probably 30 years. 

In his early days, Wayne used a topographical map and a compass. Topo maps are great, at least if you know where you are on them. In the area where we hunt, near Durango, Colorado, the original maps were made about 100 years ago and revised in 1973. Their details are reasonably good, but, of course, they don’t reflect any changes in the last 50 years, and the resolution isn’t super fine. 

We all still carry a map and a compass, as backup. 

Not long before I started hunting with him, though, Wayne started using a GPS….

Continued at https://www.phelpscountyfocus.com/faith/article_616818ee-aff8-11ee-90dc-afc1e75b9dd3.html

Last week was my rotation on the Faith page of the Phelps County Focus. I didn’t really consider the juxtaposition of the title of my article and my photo! Please read the article here:

The World’s Most Dangerous Person

Here’s a teaser:

A common belief in modern society is that there is no objective Truth, only “your truth” and “my truth.” All truth is relative, and morals are socially constructed. While this sounds like a path to freedom, with nobody to tell you what you should believe, moral relativism has been a tool of authoritarians throughout the past century or so. If truth is flexible, then it might as well be the truth as determined by the strongest. 

As Christians, we assert that there is an objective Truth. There is some divine ordering purpose to the world. There is some absolute moral code that is common to all humanity. So, the goal is to discover this Truth and apply it to your life. 

Where things go awry… (Continue reading)

The Phelps County Focus has a Faith page that features a variety of voices from the community. I have joined the rotation, which is now about every four months. Here is my first article, which was inspired by my study of Matthew 9:35-10:23:

https://www.phelpscountyfocus.com/faith/article_94def9f4-175f-11ee-9f7d-d3131c9a5ea1.html

The other day, I had coffee with my dear friend Ashley. She is the executive director of The Mission, a position she took just a few months before I started volunteering regularly there. She and I are a mutual admiration society—we both see things in each other that we wish we could be.

She recently started using a Monk Manual, after hearing me talk about it. I’ve been using a Monk Manual for about three years now, I think, and just finished “Find Your Inner Monk.” So we were talking about the process and what we get out of it. The Monk Manual is not a lightweight day planner. It’s a heavy process, built on a plan-act-reflect loop with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual cycles. The reflection piece is critical. The goal is not to get more done or to be more productive. Rather, the goal is to do the right things and to include both doing and being in your goals.

Ashley commented that I’m the most balanced person she knows. Now, perhaps that’s just because she knows all the things I do because they’re pretty public, but I do feel like I’m a well-balanced person. I run, I hunt, I preach, I volunteer. I started a nonprofit, I teach, I do research, and now I’m department chair. How and why do I do so much?

Part of the answer is that I’m not really that unusual among my peers. As I write this, I’m at the annual conference of the ECE Department Heads Association. Yesterday, there was a panel of deans. Of the five of them, two are also serving as presidents of their technical societies. People like me want to give. Everyone I’ve talked to here seems focused on the success of other people—faculty, staff, students—and wants to make the world a better place. We have all achieved certain things for ourselves, and now we want to see other people achieve great things.

The other main part of the answer is that I enjoy the process. That’s a significant teaching of the Monk Manual. If you are fundamentally driven to achieve some particular goal, your life will not be satisfying. Many junior faculty want to achieve tenure, but once they earn it, they find it to be good but not ultimately satisfying. Every mountain you summit just reveals the next one to climb. Goals are good, but they should be big goals, life goals that you know you won’t achieve but that serve as distant targets.

The reality is that life is lived one day at a time. Earning tenure, or achieving any other specific goal, happens on a specific day, which will be a good day perhaps. But the next day, you still have to get up and go to work. The better approach to life is to use your distant goals to determine which processes to put in your life, and then learn to enjoy the process. Find meaning in the mundane.

Take as an example my passion for running. Well, passion is too strong a word, much too strong. I have goals, but ultimately, I enjoy the process. I enjoy how my body feels after I run. I enjoy running on the roads and trails around my house. I enjoy listening to audiobooks while I run, to nurture my mind and soul while I’m strengthening my body. I find hills to be rewarding once I get up them. I run races (5k, 10k) not to win a prize, but for the joy of running with other people. I just enjoy the process.

The same can be said of my teaching, my research, my preaching, my volunteer work, and now my work as department chair. I find meaning in the day-to-day process, the routine. I have sought a variety of activities to nurture the different parts of my mind, soul, and body.

Where Ashley is different is that she has one big thing that she does. She wants to be more balanced; some days, I want to be more focused. There isn’t a right or wrong answer, as long as you are finding meaning in the process.

One challenge for me is travel. As I said, I am currently at a conference, and will be gone from home for about a week. It’s hard for me to maintain my daily processes while I’m out of my normal environment. So I must go now and do my weekly cycle in my Monk Manual, to keep myself grounded in the present.

Recently, I posted a list of “Edge of the Bed Advice.” One critique from my kids was that yes, they had heard much of it before and knew the stories behind many items, but without that context, they seemed like bromides or proverbs with no real depth. So here’s my first attempt to put some flesh to those bones.

I am currently going through a so-called pilgrimage, Find Your Inner Monk, from the creators of the Monk Manual. Much of the process is about decisions. How to make the right decision, how to make sure you are intentional about decision-making, how to decide out of love instead of fear. I’m also a fan of Jesuit spirituality. In The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, Father James Martin, SJ, describes several methods within the Jesuit tradition for discerning the right decision.

That’s all fine, but mostly, all decision-making literature and methods address the decisive moment. What happens before? What happens after?

In 1996, I was in graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, finishing up my MSEE. I had every intention of continuing on with doctoral studies and had even passed the qualifying exam. I pulled out of one job search, too. But then, my relationship with my advisor went through one of those down phases common to every graduate student’s academic career. I applied for a job at Motorola in Phoenix and received an offer ($46,400, above my minimum threshold for consideration of $45k). Now what?

I talked with my dad about it. He counseled me to stay for my Ph.D., but more importantly, he gave me these two pieces of advice:

Beware of making a series of small decisions that add up to a big one.

Make a choice, then do what’s necessary to make it the right one.

Bill Kimball, 1996

The first piece of advice relates to what happens before the decision. It’s easy to drift along, semi-consciously choosing what seems right all the time, and then look back and discover that you’re on a path that you would never have chosen had you fully considered all of the options. In 1996, I had not actually made an inadvertent decision, but was close to it. I think my dad was trying to get me to see the magnitude of the decision I was facing. If I left grad school, would I ever go back? How would it impact my relationship with my girlfriend at the time? What kind of life was I choosing?

Ultimately, I did decide to take the job at Motorola. Now the second piece of advice came into play. Once I left UIUC and moved to Arizona, I couldn’t go back. I had to fully inhabit that life, and do what was necessary to make that the right decision. I discovered life without my girlfriend was not good, so I proposed to her. (We now have two grown kids.) I embraced the challenges of my job and learned as much as I could—not only about MOSFETs, IGBTs, diodes, and semiconductor packaging, but also about professionalism and business practices.

That wasn’t such a good time to be working for Motorola. They completely owned the analog cellphone market, but bet heavily on satellite telephony (Iridium) instead of digital cellphone technology. Bad move. They ultimately spun off two companies out of the Semiconductor Products Sector, Freescale (now part of NXP) and ON Semi. So, here was a time when the first piece of advice came back into play.

My product group was eliminated, and ultimately sold off to a company in Tucson. I could have moved with it; if I were an Arizonan, that might have been a compelling opportunity. I had an offer to move over to the part of Motorola that made communication satellites, but the work sounded incredibly boring. A colleague and I had an offer to move together to a Motorola semiconductor group in Austin, which was really tempting. But then I received an offer from Baldor in Arkansas (now part of ABB), with work that seemed more aligned with my future.

The easiest choice would have been the communication satellite business. My wife could have kept her job; we could have kept our house, which was beautiful (if a little excessive for a family of two). But that would have been a case of making a small decision that would set us on a path we didn’t necessarily want. I ultimately took the job at Baldor, which set me on a path that, a few years later, took me back to UIUC.

The reason I had that opportunity at Baldor, and the reason I ended up back at UIUC and eventually Missouri S&T as a professor and chair, is because at each step of the way, I made the most of the opportunity. While I was at Motorola, I was inexperienced, but learning every day, working hard, and doing my very best. When I was at Baldor, I quickly became one of the best engineers, at least in the middle power range. When I returned to UIUC as a research engineer, I made sure that I met and exceeded all of the expectations of the job, so I had the flexibility to join a startup company and get my Ph.D.

Two weeks ago, I officially became the chair of my department. I don’t know if it was the right decision, but I went through some discernment and ultimately decided to apply and then to accept the offer. Now, there’s no going back. I am the chair, for better or worse. So, I plan to do whatever it takes to be the best chair I can be. I’ll take advantage of opportunities to learn and grow, and to lead our department to be the best it can be. And in the end, it will have been the right decision because of my commitment to making the most of it.

Recently, I read This Is Day One, by Drew Dudley. One of his exercises for identifying your personal leadership values, drawn from lived experience, is to write a list of advice.

If you were sitting on the edge of the bed of your son or daughter the night before they left home for good, what advice would you give them?  What are the most important lessons life has taught you so far?  Ultimately, what perspectives, actions, or ideas have played the biggest role in your happiness?

I decided that was a worthy exercise, and that I should share my list with my kids (who indeed have left home, maybe not for good but close to it). And, I might as well share the list with others, too. I won’t claim credit for every entry. They have been informed by my family (especially my parents) and friends (especially Sharon), plus books I have read and events I have attended. I do stand behind all of them, though, and all of them have been meaningful to me.

• Choose your friends wisely. They will make you better or worse.
• Some people are different from you. They value different things and have had different life experiences. That doesn’t make them right or wrong, just different.
• Have someone you can tell anything—anything at all—confident that they will still love you and want the best for you. Be that person for someone else, too.
• Taking care of your body pays long-term dividends.
• Everyone is dealing with something. Sometimes it’s obvious and public, like a wheelchair. Often it’s hidden and private. Be kind, since you don’t know what load the other person is carrying.
• It’s better to be lucky than good, but you make your own luck through hard work, a willingness to learn, and openness to others.
• Love. Always love. Love is putting other people first.
• When someone points out a mistake, the best thing to do is to correct it as best you can. If you try to defend yourself, you’ll just make it worse.
• You don’t have to understand someone to appreciate that they have the divine spark within them. That’s particularly true of LGBTQ individuals.
• As a student, you will hit a wall when the system you have doesn’t work anymore. Be willing to tear it down and build a better system. Change your study habits, your schedule, whatever.
• Have a system for tracking short-term and long-term tasks and goals. If you don’t, odds are you’ll forget something important. The system has to work for you. Get suggestions from others, but make it your own.
• If you don’t write it down, it might as well not have happened. (Speaking of research and other work.)
• Everyone’s life is a product of both their actions and their environment. Be proud of or take responsibility for your actions, but also acknowledge the people and opportunities you’ve had that formed you.
• Family is important. Chosen family—spouse, children, close friends—is essential.
• The fact that it could be worse, doesn’t make it any better.
• It is always better to make more money.
• Beware of making a series of small decisions that add up to a big one.
• Make a choice, then do what’s necessary to make it the right one.
• Public speaking is easiest when you are the person in the room who knows the most about the subject. Just define the subject to make sure that you are the most knowledgeable.
• Always be beyond reproach.
• There is no fixed timeline or process to grief or emotional healing. It is up to each person who is hurting to determine how best to heal and how long it will take. Stay on your own timeline, not someone else’s.
• The kingdom of God is at hand! We can experience it in relationships with other people.
• Abundant life is not the same as a life of abundance. Abundant life is about love, peace, hope.
• No matter how thin the pancake, there are always two sides. Life is more complex than you realize from your own perspective.
• If you have privilege—race, gender, orientation, educational, financial—use it to elevate those who don’t.
• If you want something done, give it to someone who is busy. Be that busy person who gets stuff done.
• You will often find that the people who work long hours are in the office because they don’t want to be at home. It’s OK to work hard, but don’t work as a form of escapism.
• No one person can ever be enough for you. Yes, you should choose a life partner and choose them wisely, but do not rely on them to be your only support.
• Life doesn’t follow a straight line. It’s OK to make some changes along the way that may seem like steps backwards if they make your life better in some way (e.g., short-term career pain for long-term and/or personal gain).
• Do the best you can with what you have, where you are today.
• Find good mentors, more than one. People who represent the kind of person you want to be. Since nobody is perfect, have different mentors for different parts of your life or different aspects in which you want to grow.

Last year, LGBTQ+ Rolla held its first big public event. We had held some Zoom events with just a smattering of participation, but were emboldened to hold our first Pride gathering. I had hoped for 20 or 30 people to attend and we planned accordingly. We had music and snacks, but not much else. Over 90 people showed up! I was amazed. Not only did they show up, but they had a great time, as evidenced by the fact that they stuck around for the whole evening.

We continued to hold events throughout the year, with a focus towards building community and ramping up to another Pride gathering. Knowing that people would show up, we planned a little more carefully. I remembered one of my previous greatest achievements: when I was general chair of APEC in 2017. APEC is a major conference for engineers in my field. Engineers are not known to be highly social, but we still have a social event on Wednesday night of the conference. We’ve done various things over the years, but that year, we struck gold. We rented a city park and had different activities around it: food (there has to be a meal), a live band with a dance floor, games like cornhole, hand-rolled cigars. It was a huge success because there was something for everyone.

Last night, we held Phelps Pride 22 in the lower Schuman pavilion. Instead of just a bunch of random snacks, we had food trucks—Food For Your Soul and Sweet Stop. We had music from Spotify and from a keyboardist (Chris Feaster). We had crafts—jewelry-making and tie-dying. We sold T-shirts, plain white but with our logo, perfect for tie-dying. We had games—cornhole, ladder ball, volleyball. Something for everyone. Even a speech celebrating Pride as a protest, with a reminder that our work of building a better world is never done.

IT WAS INCREDIBLE! I would say easily 200 people. The pavilion itself was full, with people filling the lawn around it for a long way in every direction. I spent most of the night at the welcome table, selling T-shirts and raffle tickets and getting people to wear name tags.

One beautiful moment came around halfway through. A guy came over to the welcome table and said, “How can I be a better ally to you?” I said, well, first of all, I’m an ally myself, so start where I started: show up. He had already done that much, so I told him to keep showing up. Secondly, I pointed him to our website, which has some good resources. But the beautiful part is that he asked. He wants to be better and do more for other people.

That’s the sort of thing I have been hoping for. By national standards, Rolla is fairly conservative; by rural Missouri standards, it’s moderate-to-progressive. Just the fact that more than 1% of the city’s population showed up to Phelps Pride is a good indication that there are supportive people in the community. But we can and must do better and be better. The burden is not on LGBTQ+ individuals—it is on straight allies. We need to make a community that is more inclusive, more open, more loving of each other.

The greatest is the enemy of the great.

From This Is Day One by Drew Dudley

Was Phelps Pride 22 better than Rolla Pride 21? Wrong question. The 2021 event will always be the first one, which makes it special. The question is, was Phelps Pride 22 a great event? Absolutely! People gathered in true community, openly living their true selves. We should strive to make every day great by helping everyone live as the best versions of themselves.

Back before the pandemic, when I was in my campus office all day most days, I would often walk up to the Mobil On the Run for a drink, or sometimes lunch. Nothing makes you feel successful like a gas station hot dog! Anyway, I don’t remember what tipped me off, but I somehow realized that a clerk there has a gay son. She and I struck up a bit of a relationship—something more than just clerk and customer but less than friendship. Like me, she loves and accepts her son but worries about him. When someone is “out,” supportive parents are great, but not really sufficient. Despite all of the progress over the years, we still live in a cis- and heteronormative world. Just look at what’s going on in Florida these days.

Being a parent is hard. Being a parent of someone LGBTQ+ just compounds it. Yesterday was the Miner Welcome Bash, a time when incoming freshmen at S&T (and their families) can come and find out about various programs on campus. There is a resource fair where many campus ministries had tables, including my church’s, Common Call Campus Ministry. I think it’s important for us to show that there is a welcoming place for everyone to explore their faith. Ignite, sponsored by First UMC, is generally accepting within the bounds of what the denomination teaches, but I believe Common Call is the only campus ministry that is explicitly and publicly progressive and inclusive. Not many students stopped by our table, but perhaps we planted a seed.

The only substantive conversation I had was with a family from St. Robert, which is just in the next county over. The student in question is LGBTQ+. The family sought me out, having been pointed in my direction during a faculty presentation. “You want to talk to Dr. Kimball. Look for the guy with the big gray beard. Best beard on campus.” The family has escaped from a very conservative Christian church and are put off by Christianity, even if it’s progressive. I gave my little spiel, just for the record, then pivoted to what they really wanted to know: What’s the campus climate like for queer students? I connected them to our student diversity programs and also shared that by the standards of a small town in rural Missouri, we’re pretty inclusive—though that is admittedly a low bar. I also told them about Pulaski Pride and other activities down in St. Robert.

The organizer in Pulaski County once spoke at a parents panel that LGBTQ+ Rolla put on. Although she is herself transgender, she worries a lot about her queer kid. She knows how hard her life has been. She knows that things are better now than, say, thirty years ago, but that doesn’t mean her kid’s life will be easy. Especially around here.

I’m motivated to change that. I know that as an ally, and a cisgender, heterosexual, white man, I will never understand what gay, transgender, and other queer individuals go through. At the same time, if I just sit back and wait for someone else to act, nothing will change. I founded LGBTQ Rolla two years ago to provide a focal point for the LGBTQ+ community in Rolla and Phelps County. We’re gearing up for our second annual Phelps Pride (this Friday night!). As the organization has evolved, I have tried to drift more and more into the background. I’m not the president—I’m the secretary/treasurer. I don’t know what it’s like to be gay, but I do know how to balance a checkbook and can learn how to file with the IRS, the Missouri Department of Revenue, the Missouri Secretary of State, and so forth. At Pride, I can hand out T-shirts and sell new ones. I can do the administrative stuff so that LGBTQ+ individuals can lead the narrative and just enjoy time together. I’m an admin on our Facebook page, not to control the discussion but to kill spam.

So, happy Pride month! I’m looking forward to our second annual gathering and I’m hopeful about the future of the LGBTQ+ community in my adopted home. And happy Father’s Day to all the gay and trans dads out there and all the fathers of queer kids.

This Holy Saturday, I’m once again thinking about liminal times. This is the day that we recount in the Apostles’ Creed when we say, “He descended into hell.” This is the day we remember the already-but-not-yet nature of salvation. Jesus has died for our sins and will conquer death. In fact, he already has, but we cannot experience God’s kin-dom fully just yet, only in part.

Everything is temporary. The only thing constant is change. Making predictions is hard, especially about the future. However you say it, the fact is that the future is unknown and unknowable. We dwell in this time and space where something good or bad will happen soon, but we don’t know what or when.

Our church currently has no installed pastor. We are in an in-between space, where we don’t know what the future will hold for us. How long will our current situation last? I preach twice monthly, Susan Murray and Rev. Bob Morrison preach once monthly, and we have other fill-ins; our session is moderated by a pastor who is installed at a different church; our various committees are operating under lay leadership. This operating regime is working for now, but will the situation be resolved in six months, two years, or never? What kind of new ministry might we undertake, either before or after we get a new installed pastor?

Our campus leadership is constantly in flux—less so now than in the past, but we still have a lot of people in interim roles. My department has an interim chair, as do several others around campus. The campus has three dean positions; one (mine) is stepping down at the end of the fiscal year, one is interim, and the other is a new position that has not yet been filled. I’m currently on one of the dean search committees, as well as two other search committees.

An opportunity may be presenting itself to me. Our dean (who is stepping down soon) is in the process of opening an internal search for a permanent department chair to replace my department’s interim chair. I am almost certain to apply, in no small part because several people have encouraged me to do so. But the position has not actually been opened yet. Assuming it is opened and I apply, will I be interviewed? Will I get an offer, and if so, will it be acceptable? I can do some things now to prepare, but ultimately, there’s nothing I can do to rush the process. I have to sit in this liminal time, this in-between time.

Today, I’m feeling the waiting acutely for another reason. I’m the chair of a committee on campus. The UM System rules changed, so my committee (meaning me) drafted a policy to implement the rules on our campus. The policy has been circulated for comment. Most of the comments were negative; some were pretty emotional. I believe the anger resulted from a misunderstanding. We have a meeting on Monday where I’m going to present the policy and the reasoning. I have shared a bit with a friend of mine who, because of his background and position, could become a strong ally or a strong opponent. Of course I believe that I’m in the right, so I expect the former, but friendship aside, I could be wrong and he could turn out to be an opponent. I just don’t know, and whatever his response is today, I can’t know until Monday’s meeting. I have to live in that space of not knowing.

The message of Easter is this: in the end, life wins. Love wins. God wins. We can’t know the future, but we do know that God loves us and will always care for us. If things go sideways on Monday, or our church ultimately fails, that doesn’t change the fact that I am beloved by God and that in the end, all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

I’m on the steering committee for the IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference, having served as general chair in 2017. It’s held ever year in March (or possibly late February). It’s a bit unusual in that it has very strong academic participation AND very strong industry participation, including an exposition. At our peak, we had over 5000 attendees and over 300 exhibitors. We were growing every year, like a runaway freight train.

APEC’20 was supposed to be in New Orleans starting March 16. Those first few months of 2020 were pretty crazy, with meetings several times a week to figure out what to do. We finally had to pull the plug, in a manner that was unsatisfying to everyone involved. Like the train crash in Back to the Future III.

In 2021, we had hoped to be able to hold it in Phoenix as planned, and even shifted to June in hopes that the COVID status would improve, but again were unable to gather in person. (I’m not going to lie—I wasn’t looking forward to JUNE in Phoenix!) I was the mastermind behind THE BEST VIRTUAL APEC EVER! And, Lord willing, the only one. We had decent engagement, probably the best of any virtual conference, but it just wasn’t the same.

Last week, we had our first real conference of the pandemic, in Houston. All of our metrics were around the 60% point—2900 attendees, 220 exhibitors, etc. We had little to no attendance from Asia (especially China). Basically, we have experienced a ten-year setback. Hopefully, the growth over the next few years is quick so that we can return to pre-pandemic size in fewer than ten years, but we shall see.

Still: IT WAS AWESOME! Seeing all my colleagues again. Having a long conversation over (non-alcoholic) beer. Short, casual connections with lots of people. Seeing what’s going on in industry—new products, companies I had forgotten, mergers and spin-offs. Rejuvenating my creativity in the technical presentations.

I’m not known as a people-person. I’m an introvert, and conferences exhaust me. I hate travel, too. But I love going to APEC every year, and I hope to never miss one again. Really, what makes it special is the people. Having spent the first decade of my career in industry (including a start-up) makes me value the perspective that practicing engineers have. The ones who come to APEC are engineers who are dedicated to their craft. Like academics, they strive to understand the limits of technology while pushing them a little bit further in service of their project goals.

Most importantly, they are my community. We all need to feel like we are part of something bigger than ourselves. I’m a member of several different communities: my university, my church, my town, Steelers fans, elk hunters, etc. APEC gives me an opportunity to transcend geography and connect with people who share a love of power electronics, a goal of improving efficiency and cost-effectiveness of everything from handheld devices to electric vehicles to solar energy to satellites. Going to APEC, wherever it is held, feels like going home.

Can’t wait ‘til APEC’23 in Orlando!