Why did you decide to become an engineer? 10

[bigTomHanks]

Why did you decide to become an engineer and what was the biggest misconception that you had about what an engineer does before working in the profession?

For me I started taking automechanics at community college and realized quickly that I didn't need to pay someone to teach me how to repair cars. I also wanted to know how engines were designed but didn't know that mechanical engineering was what I needed to study until already in college.

I thought that the work done my most engineers in industry couldn't be completed without the knowledge gained in school.

 

[HgTX]

Never had any Dilbertian "knack". But we did a unit on "structures" in school when I was 9, building things from straight pins and soda straws. (Straight pins are probably not permitted in elementary schools any more.) My structure held up the most weight hung from it. Then we were asked to cut straws and repeat the exercise. I didn't have the terminology, but what was in my head translated to, "Well, if you'd told me redundancy was going to be one of the criteria, I would have given you a different design." Then we added thread to our straight pins and soda straws and built suspension bridges. That got me interested in the big suspension bridges all around where I lived at the time, and I have loved steel structures ever since.

Applied to engineering school through process of elimination: was good at foreign languages but didn't want to be a French major and at the time didn't know that the field of linguistics existed; was good at math but my mother rightly talked me out of being a math major; had only just started chemistry and had not yet started physics when it was time to apply to college (I decided to leave high school a year early), so I wasn't ready to say I wanted to be a chemistry or phsyics major. My mother, grandfather, and father were all engineers, so I resisted at first on the grounds of "everyone is an engineer, why would I want to do that?" Mom tried telling me that most normal people, outside of families like mine, do not think "everyone is an engineer"; at the time I didn't believe her. But process of elimination prevailed.

Applied to mechanical engineering programs also by process of elimination. My misconception was that civil engineers mostly did earthwork stuff and I wasn't interested. Had no background in things electrical, so no EE, and the same logic for not applying to be a chemistry major also applies to ChemE.

The ME thing lasted a semester. I discovered the existence of linguistics, put that in the back of my mind; discovered computer science and declared that major; continued in my misconception about civil engineering. I did kind of know that CivE built bridges, but I wanted to build fancy bridges and knew that there weren't that many going up around the world, and besides, more misconception about the very separate disciplines within CivE, I was afraid if I aimed for bridges I'd get sewers and roadbeds.

Declared computer science major. After a couple of years transferred to linguistics. That was a logical progression. I dropped out of a linguistics PhD program for reasons not germane to this discussion, and then had an epiphany: civil engineers build buildings, too! If I can't have bridges, I can have skyscrapers. So I went back to engineering school, this time with a plan in mind for structural engineering. College is so much easier when you know what you want to do and why.

And then...I built bridges. Fancy ones even.

Hg

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