Engineers! Please share you experiences!!!

[Mikell Taylor]

1. What excites you most about engineering as a career?
It's really creative, I get to work with a very diverse group of people, and building robots is awesome because it's like living a permanent sci-fi movie.

2. What made you decide to become an engineer?
I always wanted to be an astronaut, so my parents told me to do that I had to get into engineering. I got to like math and science a lot, so I had this chain of interest in chemical engineering, then software engineering, then electrical, then mechanical, and now systems. FIRST is what made me stay in engineering and decide to work on robots.

3. In your job, how important are good communication skills (written and spoken)?
Extremely important! The robots we build are complicated systems that need everyone to work together seamlessly, so software/electrical/mechanical/manufacturing all need to understand each other really well -- who's responsible for which parts? What modifications are needed? How do high-level requirements affect the detailed design we have to do? How do you make sure the other departments know when you've made a change and how it might affect them? Also, I've had to give a ton of presentations in front of customers about the system, answer their questions, and generally make them feel good about what we're building for them. There's a lot to be learned about talking with customers versus teammates versus management vs whomever, and it's a really valuable skill to have.

4. Do you primarily work alone or in teams?
In teams, all the time, anywhere from four people to fifteen people. I have my own individual work to do, but it is one part in a big chain of tasks for the team, so I'm always aware of where I fit into the big picture.

5. Is it important for an engineer to understand strength of materials concepts (stress, strain, deformations)?
I'm not an ME, so I can't answer too specifically, but since we send robots down to 6000m depth (and therefore under a LOT of pressure) our MEs spend a LOT of time talking about material deformation and strain. There's also safety factors that come in pretty handy -- a single lift point for a 1-ton vehicle has to be guaranteed to hold.

6. What kind of engineering did you study?
My degree is electrical and computer engineering, and I took a bunch of mechanical classes my last couple of years.

7. What kind of engineering do you do now?
Systems engineering, with a bit of an electrical slant.