[Venkatesh]

"I have learned that engineering is not just creativity. It is not just tinkering with ideas, but rather, a system by which a professional product can be created and documented."

That comes from the esteemed Dr.Christoe's (aka Dr.Poe) PoE class. To those of you who know what Project Lead the Way is, you know what PoE is. Dr.Poe spent 23 years in engineering at Bell Labs, and before that he was a weapons engineer for a number of years.

At any rate, I can't call anyone without a degree an engineer. I can't even call some people with degrees engineers, as they would more properly fall into the categories of tinkerers and inventors. As Mr.Baker pointed out earlier, a lot of his time is spent in procedures supporting his inventing, not his inventing alone. I won't say that the video game guy down the street is incompetent. He might have incredible talents with, say programming. He might have drafted up parts of the Linux kernel. None of that is impossible or even unheard of. Or if you follow Slashdot, recently they ran a story on a 60-odd year old Afghan man, who had invented many, many things to help people around him. He had no formal training, and yet was able to design radios. I would be very impressed to meet him, but I still woundn't call him an engineer. I guess it all depends on how you define an "engineer".

Before I started studying to become an EMT, I had very little respect for the area. Not because I thought that their work was so easy. Because I didn't know the scope of the field. Now it is a completely different matter. I now realize how little I know. I know now that (in NJ) most of what I can do is, "oxygen and transport, oxygen and transport". I realize that Paramedics are awesome, for their heart rhythm monitoring, intubation, and narcane. (In NJ, we don't have any levels in between EMT-B and EMT-P).

Engineering is a professional field. Tinkering is a hobbyist one. Many FIRST teams I know of are engaged in the business of tinkering, not engineering. I don't say that that is a bad thing or a good thing. Its just that they are separate. One can lead into the other, a master mechanical tinkerer might become a mechanical engineer through schooling/training. But they are separated by the vast abyss of obtuse and painful subjects, like Rigid Body Dynamics, Mechatronic Systems, Lagrangian Dynamics, Ballistics, and other complex fields.

The one thing I always loved about computers was the fact that one guy in the corner of his basement could *theoretically* write programs just as well as a full professional team. After learning more of PHP and perl, and meeting a monster called PHPTAL, I discarded those notions. I can write programs, but I am by no means a programmer. I can use a sledgehammer, but I am by no means a carpenter.