First Day Jitters Heres What Your Company Expects From You on Your First Day

First Day Jitters Heres What Your Company Expects From You on Your First Day The first day of a new job can engender a multitude of emotions ranging from excitement to nerve-wracking anxiety. One of the big sources of anxiety comes from the lack of control over the unknown. What will your boss expect from you on your first day on the job? The fortunate answer to this question is not much. Thats right, Day 1 expectations are pretty low, but you will be expected to be punctual and show up ready to learn the ropes. Get ready to meet people, experience the work environment for the first time, and begin to gradually build your reputation among your coworkers and superiors. Even though first-day expectations arent very demanding, there are a few things you should consider when entering your new workplace for the first time. The first thing to keep in mind is that the higher you build expectations about your productivity at first, the harder it is going to be to keep pace with yourself. Most people feel the need to over perform during their first several weeks at a new job, but this sprinting mentality will quickly lead to job burnout. By working harder than you are capable of maintaining, and building expectations that you can regularly perform at that level, your productivity will eventually kurze unterhose below the high bar and you will be seen as less capable than when you started.Pace yourself and take some time to adjust to your new position and adapt to the company. Dont try too hard too fast to avoid making silly mistakes and keeping expectations at a workable level. This way, you can get better at your work, over time, and appear even more impressive than your initial days.Relatedly, dont equate your value as an employee with your knowledge of a job youve possibly never worked before. You arent supposed to know everything about your job at first. In fact, if you show up i ntending to show off how much you know and end up being perceived as trying to change things to your preferences you will be thought of as an annoyance at best, and potentially even as a workplace disruption. Instead, you should approach your new job with an open mind, be willing to share your ideas when solicited, and be able handle to the prevailing attitudes of your bosses and coworkers.Dont be afraid to mess up. As a new employee, you are expected to make mistakes and you shouldnt feel ashamed about admitting them. Dont worry about making a bad impression. Hiding the fact that youve screwed something up and being found out is much worse than admitting to the mistake and showing that you have learned from it. Be honest. Ask for feedback on how you can do your job better. Earn the respect of your peers and bosses by using each mistake as an opportunity to learn and grow.Finally, understand that most employers will not fire you for your choices unless you perform the same mistakes repeatedly and fail to learn from them or do something illegal. Terminating offenses can include anything from mishandling cash, lying, treating customers with disrespect, stealing product or confidential information, chronic tardiness, and lack of accountability and refusal to accept personal failures by blaming them on others. So, fear not, unless you try really hard to get canned or have a seriously flawed work ethic, you should have no fears of hair-trigger firings.In sum, most employers expect only a handful of basic behaviors when you start your job (and for as long as you wish to remain employed) be punctual, use your mistakes to grow not punish yourself or others, be honest, keep an open mind, be motivated, and genuinely care about your job performance and the quality of your work.

New Process Transforms Lithium Battery Recycling

New Process Transforms Lithium Battery Recycling New Process Transforms Lithium Battery Recycling New Process Transforms Lithium Battery RecyclingResearchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have received a $1-million contract from the United States Advanced Battery Consortium (USABC), a collaborative organization of FCA US, Ford Motor Company, and General Motors, to further develop and scale-up a novel process that WPI developed for wiedergewinnung lithium-ion batteries.Led by Yan Wang, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at WPI, director of the Electrochemical Energy Laboratory, and affiliated faculty member in the Center for Resurce Recovery and Recycling, the research team developed a process that can recover any cathode chemistry, with no battery sorting required. This is a vast improvement over the current approach, which involves sorting the batteries by cathode chemistry to avoid mixing incompatible formulations. This labor-intensive and expensive process is complicated by the difficulty of determining the exact material used in a given battery. Wangs process saves considerable time and labor, making wide-scale recycling of lithium-ion batteries more feasible and profitable.Prof. Yan Wang with a battery recycling reactor. Image Worcester Polytechnic InstituteHow It WorksBatteries are among the costliest components of electric and hybrid vehicles, says Wang. If we can reduce the cost of lithium-ion batteries using our process, while still recovering and reusing large amounts of materials that are currently being thrown away, we can offer a value-driven path toward improved industry sustainability.Wangs recycling process is a closed loop. The first step is fully discharging the batteries and shredding them into small pieces. A sieving process recovers the fine and coarse powders, which include the cathode materials. The powders are chemically leached to recover the lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel used in the cathodes. After lea ching, the pH of the solution can be adjusted to remove the impurities and then precipitate out new cathode materials with specific compositions, based on industry needs.In addition to recovering cathode materials, we also recycle steel, copper, aluminum, graphite and most of the materials used in the batteries, says Wang. We can recycle up to 80 percent of the cathode materials from unsorted batteries using this process.Moving ForwardThe rechargeable lithium-ion battery market was $11.8 billion in 2011 and is expected to increase to $50 billion by 2020. With rapid growth in the consumer electronics and hybrid and electric vehicle markets, lithium-ion batteries will only grow in demand. However, currently they are not widely recycled because it is not economically justifiable instead they are thrown away and add to the toxicity of landfills.Wangs process, however, dramatically improves the economics of recycling lithium-ion batteries.When we first started this research a few years a go, many researchers didnt care much about recycling, say Wang. They argued that there werent enough lithium-ion batteries to be recycled and it wasnt economical to recycle them. The basic thought was that this research would only be important in the future. Now, though, people are changing their minds. They know that lithium-ion battery recycling is critical. And, fortunately, now we have the solution.The United States Advanced Battery Consortium will finance the scale-up of the process from the current lab scale, which produces coin cells, to a larger process that will be validated using 25 Ah cells made by a world-class battery manufacturer under subcontract to WPI. Wangs research has shown that his recycling process could cut the cost of cathode materials for vehicle batteries by more than 30 percent.Cathodes are increasingly made from mixed materials, which makes it very difficult for recyclers to process them because they dont know the cathode chemistry. Thats the main reason USABC chose our recycling process, says Wang. With our closed-loop process, we can extract the cathode materials and put them right back into new batteries that are equal in quality to the original batteries. And our final product is highly valuable cathode material that can be used to make new batteries. We now have the ability to recycle these valuable materials and keep them out of the waste stream.Mark Crawford is an independent writer.Learn about the latest energy solutions at ASMEsPower Energy Conference and Exhibition.We can recycle up to 80 percent of the cathode materials from unsorted lithium-ion batteries using this new process.Prof. Yan Wang, Worcester Polytechnic Institute