Engineers! Please share you experiences!!!

[vhcook]

1. What excites you most about engineering as a career?

All of the biggest and most permanent changes in the world over the last few hundred years were caused by engineers and scientists. Everything we use, from obviously complex things like computers, cellphones, and cars to seemingly simple things like roads, bridges, and even toilets, have been passed through the careful hands and brains of many engineers. Engineers have done so many things nobody really thinks about, like figuring out how to make a bridge in a new place that won't break when a train goes across it without having massively overbuild or guess and hope it doesn't fail. That used to be a big deal. Now, it's just another bridge, but it still takes a lot of care that the users never appreciate to make it right. Every area of engineering is like that, and you never know what's going to be the next huge world-changing thing.

2. What made you decide to become an engineer?

I've always been good at math and science, and I like knowing how things work and how they're put together. I started working with computers as soon as I was literate enough to count parentheses for my dad. My grandfather was an electrical engineer, and he was a really neat guy. By the time I needed to decide, I couldn't really imagine doing anything else.

3. In your job, how important are good communication skills (written and spoken)?

Absolutely critical. A large portion of my current job is taking projects that are going through my company and figuring out what the technicians who will have to maintain them need to know, and then telling them, while communicating back to the design engineers what they can do to make things less likely to fail and easier to repair when they do. {As you've probably learned through FIRST, everything breaks eventually.}

I have to write up reports for management on what I'm working on and hand-off documents for the field technicians I support. I attend countless meetings where my ability to explain my point of view clearly and quickly determines whether the project team ignores me, answers my question, or makes a change to fix the problem I've found. I get to do the same thing in email. I also write detailed maintenance procedures, which have to be accurate and clear enough that when a technician I've never met tries to execute them at three in the morning he doesn't make a mistake that will affect our customers and can get to the end without having to stop or wake someone up for help.

I write and give training presentations. There is a special horror in having to watch and listen to an entire two-hour playback of yourself giving a training class by videoconference, knowing that every um and er is going to be available on the department training website for people to replay at their leisure, and realizing there are too many to edit out.

4. Do you primarily work alone or in teams?
Yes.

Most of my job is working on projects that affect many departments and have a lot of people working together on them. The direct team size varies from a dozen to a few hundred people, depending on the level of complexity. I spend most of my time talking to people, formally or informally, about different projects and platforms I support. I also get to go off into my corner a fair amount to take care of my individual tasks, but everything has to be communicated to somebody.

5. Is it important for an engineer to understand strength of materials concepts (stress, strain, deformations)?

At the most basic levels, yes. Just knowing they exist and the general situations in which you need to find an expert to have a look at those issues is important in almost any engineering situation. It's not necessary for every engineer to be an expert on them, unless they're in a field where that's the fundamental problem being solved, but every engineer needs to know when to punt.

6. What kind of engineering did you study?
Electrical Engineering

7. What kind of engineering do you do now?
Systems Engineering/Operations Support

[Tom Line]

Here are the questions I need answers to:
1. What excites you most about engineering as a career?
I've always been a problem solver. You can usually pick out the kids who will grow up to be engineers. They're the ones tearing apart their nintendo, their vcr, their minibike, and their parents cars. Oddly enough, when they put them back together - they still work. Or they work better.

2. What made you decide to become an engineer?
See #1.


3. In your job, how important are good communication skills (written and spoken)?
Good communication skills are absolutely the one of the most important skills you can have. You may have the perfect solution to a problem, but if you cannot convince everyone else that it is the perfect solution then it won't be implemented. Unfortunately, there are a lot of engineers without the talent or experience to make decent evaluations based on data and calculations. That means that in many cases you will be in a position where you have to convince others you are right.

4. Do you primarily work alone or in teams?
Well that depends. If I can do the job myself, I do it. But I sit with 8 other engineers. I would say that at least a dozen times a day I ask them to take a look at something. Being in a team is about having different viewpoints and approaching problems from different angles.

5. Is it important for an engineer to understand strength of materials concepts (stress, strain, deformations)?
That depends what type of engineer you are. In most cases only a PE needs to worry about strength of materials. Nowadays computers handle most of the computations for shear, tensile, etc. A PE needs a thorough understanding if they're going to be signing off on safety. Otherwise, most of the time, you can use cookie-cutter or off-the-shelf solutions that already have the specs written on them.

6. What kind of engineering did you study?
Mechanical, with electrical and programming as minors.

7. What kind of engineering do you do now?
I'm a glorified secretary. I still do some problem solving on assembly lines, but it's not "engineering" as I always envisioned it. That said, I enjoy the job, which is really the only important part.

[JesseK]

Here are the questions I need answers to:
1. What excites you most about engineering as a career?
I solve problems, create many things, and directly see the results of my efforts first hand. Sometimes I like it because it's just plain hard and there aren't many other things that I would find both interesting and challenging. You make a decent amount of money at it too, but it's more about the fact that I really like what I do; money really is secondary. Once you experience it, you'll understand.

2. What made you decide to become an engineer?
The hand-me-down Tandy computer my dad gave me when I was in 2nd grade, and legos. In high school it was fueled designing trick plays for our football team and then running them. Oh yea, and calculus was really easy so I figured college wouldn't be that bad, right?

3. In your job, how important are good communication skills (written and spoken)?
They're as necessary as the job I do. If I can't properly communicate an idea to my team leads via proposal or presentation, it will get rejected for a sometimes lesser idea. If I can't report proper status to my managers, they don't know how much money to allocate to our project or our future projects. If I can't communicate with my coworkers, well, really no one would get anything done.

4. Do you primarily work alone or in teams?
Both. When I code, I'm alone but I have peer reviews and collaboration with other devs. When I do h/w, it's almost always at least paired.

5. Is it important for an engineer to understand strength of materials concepts (stress, strain, deformations)?
Extremely important, even for software/electrical engineers. Sure, we don't care about the shear strength of silicon, but we do care about scattering, heat, processor load, and everything else under the sun. In a multi-million dollar system, if you've never considered stresses of indepedent systems upon each other you are in for alot of frustration and heartache.

6. What kind of engineering did you study?
Electrical Engineering

7. What kind of engineering do you do now?
Software & Electrical
For the FRC team I do mechanical since we have plenty of electrical engineers. Go figure

[Liz C]

Thank you so much for the responses! They are going to be a great addition for our project.

I forgot to mention to please include the information of what company you worked at and for how many years.

Thanks so much!