Being and thinking like an Engineer

How effectively are you putting your engineering skills to use?

Listing here a few commonly heard or said statements or something similar to them:

• Too many engineers, too few jobs!
• Preference for the branch or college?
• Income is less, for the avg many :(
• Not for the artistic lot! only for the ones, technically sound in maths...
• You're not a CS student, what inspired you to shift to the IT field?
  

Oh no! "Don't limit yourself. You can be anything you wish.”

Engineering offers the skillset needed for problem solving and innovation, it can be in software, machines, electronics, or any other field.

You can flirt with skills, having no intention of interest, but you can't tease and get teased by the craft if there is no affection.
Engineers should use and enhance their skills, to solve the challenges and improvements to make the world a better place. Engineers specialized in one domain, with effort and right actions can work in another engineering field, as the tasks would ask for knowledge in more than one area, all that matters now is to have a deeper understanding of the subject at hand.

What exactly are the skills referred to here? And what challenges are solved with the skills engineers have?

Skills:

• Quick acceptance of change and turning to learn the relevant skills.
• Given a problem, how many different ways can you tackle it? How far would you go to figure out the solution?
• Reinforcement learning from your daily life.
• How deeply do you understand the problem, and what are your interpretations of it?

These seem like regular things you would normally do, when you face difficulty, in your life. Yes exactly, all of us have the engineering talent in us.

Let's look at this with an example - When there is only a little toothpaste left in the tube. How would you make use of it?

1. Use a close-toothed fork to extract the paste efficiently.
2. Cut off the back portion of the tube to clean use the paste.
3. Build a simple plastic prototype to roll the tube from behind, to completely push the paste forward. This way we can keep the paste in the front portion from the beginning of its use.
   You can add more ideas to this list.

Thinking and mindset are what differentiate an engineer from the rest. If a task is presented to an engineer, they should figure out the solution.

Summary so far:

• Acquiring the skills is important and not the branch(you can always move to an area where you want to work).
• You can create your own work - as long as there are people, there would be problems and definitely, engineers are needed to solve them and make life easier.
• Engineering is a conglomeration of designing, developing, researching, improving, testing, manufacturing, and many more.

It's a privilege to be an engineer. Discover your inner engineer now or worry later.

Happy reading :)