Engineers! Please share you experiences!!!

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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