Engineering Is a Profession
Engineering is a profession where knowledge and skills are used to develop and solve practical problems. First of all, with knowledge, an engineer will be able to apply scientific knowledge and mathematics to design new artifacts, technologies and material objects such as machines and hardware’s and turns ideas into reality which improve the quality of human life. In addition, engineer’s give us better solutions, improve upon existing technologies to meet our new requirements and making things work more conveniently and economical. Secondly, become an engineer involves skills such as communication and the ability to work with others interdisciplinary groups and multidisciplinary surroundings. For example, to build a house, an engineer must have the ability to deal with different group of people with different areas of engineering such as architects, and electricians. Additionally, planning and management skills are also required which help an engineer for implementation and coordination of businesses overheads like costs, equipment’s, supplies and technical boundaries. Finally, an engineer has on-going responsibilities to check and monitor the system after its implementation and also have to investigate failures and learn from them in order to ensure safety standard and have the highest quality of production.
When I ask people surrounded me about the role of engineering, the public response was mostly related to an engineer fix things in construction and mechanics rather than design, creativity and problem solving. Few however, relate the word engineer to either a skill or as profession. In addition to that, while exploring through the internet about how the public differently see the role of engineer, I begin to realized that the public degraded the task of engineering, for instance, Design impact 2009, gave an example of asking some college students “why aren’t you studying engineering?” and the common answer was “because I want to