Attention engineers...What type are you and why?

[petek]

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

Engineers are people who engineer solutions to problems.

I have to go along with Dave's definition. Is it really all that important how one acquires the knowledge needed to engineer solutions, as long as the problem gets solved?

As for me, I'm:
a) Electronics technologist by degree (AAS in Electronics, Delaware Tech, eons ago);
b) Sr. Project Manager by title (which means squat, but sounds nice);
c) A mix of electrical, mechanical and chemical engineer by job function (which still doesn't mean I'm a real engineer);
d) Responsible for coming up with technical solutions to real problems encountered in drug discovery every day. I lead a small group of engineers and technicians, and am the only one in the company who can do electro-mechanical design engineering and project management.

Okay, I don't have a BS degree, and I don't claim to be able to do a lot of the more technical aspects of engineering, but I have a pretty good track record of developing effective solutions to real problems. In my current job I replaced a person with an MS in mechanical engineering - a fellow who, in my opinion, never produced a single effective solution to anyone's problem in the eight years I knew him. So who is the "engineer" here?

As to why I am doing what I do: I get to work with a bunch of very talented scientists, learn new things every day, work with leading-edge laboratory automation and analytical instrumentation, occasionally get to invent something, and get paid for it! Besides solving problems, I get a lot of satisfaction from helping the people in my group develop their skills and expand their capabilities.

Right now I'm working on projects to:
- automate testing of drug candidates in an assay which models the human gut;
- manage a project to build an instrument which can dispense 500 nanoliter droplets (too small to see) at 80 drops per second with better than 7% accuracy in a dispensed sample population of over 60,000 drops;
- replicate a robotic work cell (which my group developed) that separates really nasty (very acidic) organic solutions containing high value chemicals in solution.

How much more fun could a person have?!