Engineers! Please share you experiences!!!

[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.