3 Things You Need to Know About Becoming an Engineer

Future engineers typically demonstrate an aptitude for math, science and logical thinking when they are younger. Engineers also often have certain personal traits, such as being logical, careful, good planners, creative, and mildly obsessive, personal qualities that increase their effectiveness as engineers. There are many different career tracks within the engineering profession, and we will discuss a few of the subdisciplines here.

Engineering has been defined a discipline, art and profession. Within engineering, one uses technical and scientific knowledge to develop materials, structures, devises, systems or processes that fulfill a desired task or objective. The concept of engineering is as ancient as the wheel, but the term was not coined until 1325 in relation to a maker of machinery, such as a catapult. The root word "engine" derives from the Latin word ingenium (also from which our words ingenuity and genius were derived), which means essentially" something of great quality and cleverness. " Accordingly, people who perform engineering, or engineers, are generally regarded as being quite bright, and this is indeed a prerequisite to a successful profession.

As with most any field, engineering can be divided into different specialized subdisciplines. Individual engineers may work in only one of these or may work across the disciplines at given point in time, on a set of projects, or across their lifetime. Broadly, the subdisciplines can be labeled as aerospace engineering, which includes the design of air/spacecraft and related devices; chemical engineering, in which chemistry and chemical principles are used to develop inventions or complete tasks; civil engineering, which is often concerned with completion of public infrastructure tasks, including roads, dams, and so forth, but also can involve private enterprises, such as refineries; electrical engineering, which most recently has been concerned with the refinement of transistors, capacitors and computing semiconductors, and mechanical engineering, which relies on both mechanical and physical principles. Some also classify separate subdisciplines of computer engineering, which involved the coding of software and not only hardware, and environmental engineering, which addresses environmental problems such as water and air quality, using technical and scientific principles.

Sometimes people will compliment that, "You think like an engineer." (At least some take it as a complement). What exactly does this mean? First, engineers are knowledgeable about technology, math and science. Second, engineers consider multiple options and approaches to problem simultaneously and perform cost/benefit analyses to ascertain the safest, most likely, and most efficient path forward. It is a weighing process of weighing risks and rewards and seeing multiple sides to every problem in which engineers are trained. The engineer's aspiration is not only job completion, but rather optimization. It should be the best solution given objective and constraints, and not simply a solution. An important aspect of engineering then is to be able to predict future outcomes. As a result, much of engineering involves modeling, building prototypes or simulations, and engaging in tests, such as destructive, nondestructive and stress tests, to determine the likelihood and desirability of certain outcomes. The study of failure is often referred to as forensic engineering and understanding the reasons for, prevention of, and likelihood of failure is essential to good engineering.

Source:

http://www.engineering.com/