Engineer Life

My dad was an engineer and he liked to say that being an engineer is about doing for a nickel what any fool can do for a dollar. I guess only an engineer would think that is a great sales pitch for being an engineer. But I think it is true. Being an engineer is not just about solving a problem. It is about finding the best, most elegantly simple solution.

Engineering, in general, means taking an idea and making it a reality. Any fool can come up with an idea, (especially bad ones), but not every fool can make it reality. The more thoughtful and imaginative the idea, the more exciting tackling the reality will be.

For me, being an engineer fits my personality. I like understanding how things work, why they work the way they do, and I like figuring out how they might work better. EE fits well in that it offers broad access to lots of different engineering problems, including how to make things operate with as little energy waste as possible. Plus there’s all the fame and fortune…

I went to a tiny rural-area school with no career planning.  I never heard of engineering in high school, but I took what came naturally to me my freshman year in college: calculus, physics, chemistry.  There I learned about engineering and that jobs are in high demand and the pay is great.  This is still very much the case and it always will be.  As a junior, I learned that the thermo-fluid sciences were all about output over input, which is, efficiency.  I’m also an efficiency nut in that I cannot look at a process or function without imagining how…

To me engineering simply means identifying a problem and finding a solution, i.e. problem-solving! This can be through designing or building something or through tweaking the way something already works. I don’t think someone becomes an engineer just through formal education. It’s the way someone thinks, either with a math and science oriented brain or through deconstructing and rebuilding just to see if they can fix a problem or understand the inner-workings. There are a lot more engineers in this world than the ones with the degrees, some of the best engineers don’t have the formal education. National Engineers Week…