Term paper for a generic Intro to Engineering class.
Should I be an
engineer? Surely this is a question every student wrestles with at
some point. Many who ask it may decide not to become engineers. While
it may be a tough decision for some, it's a given for me. I love
designing, analyzing, building, and testing systems. I thrive on
tough situations – there's nothing that gets my brain going quite
like a malfunctioning circuit or a buggy piece of software.
I embarked on the
path to becoming an engineer early in life. It began with taking
things apart – as a child, I would disassemble anything I was given
the chance to. At eleven, I completely disassembled the old laptop my
dad had given me so I could replace a noisy fan. When I put it back
together, the fan had been silenced and my laptop was lighter by a
couple of screws – but it still worked!
I owe much of my
inspiration in recent years to my past – and only – employer. An
entrepreneur and engineer himself, he once told me that he used to
have a keen interest in bird watching. Once he knew all of the birds
in his area, he got bored and moved on to electronics. He hasn't
gotten bored yet. I have never had an interest in bird watching, but
I certainly have never gotten bored with engineering.
My boss also taught
me the importance of moving the status quo. When I started working at
his company, I was given the freedom to work on a number of extremely
interesting projects. As time went on, rather than working on
important projects that would have an impact on our industry, my time
was spent on menial projects that were barely related to my area of
interest. When I proposed new projects that would move the company
forward and set them up to have products to sell in ten years, they
were shot down for being too ambitious, too complicated, or too
expensive. When I quit four months ago, the company was scrambling to
piece together a prototype that was strikingly similar to something I
proposed almost two years before. They were hopelessly behind the
industry and will release one or two product iterations that are
painfully expensive and time consuming. Even then, they'll probably
never catch up. The lesson I learned: move early. If you wait for the
market to tell you what to do, you'll always be behind. Sometimes you
can succeed by fulfilling a market's obvious demands, but to truly
make a difference you have to be the one who reads the cards and
takes the market to the next level.
A desire to move
the status quo is why I'm hoping to intern at Upverter in the coming
months. They're a small Candadian startup doing work in the
electronic design automation (EDA) space. While the product they're
creating isn't essential yet, it has the potential to change how we
design and test electronic systems. This is no easy goal, but for
something that could transform the EDA market before this decade is
out, it's worth the effort.
Engineering is not
for everyone, but it is everything for me. I find engineering
intriguing, exciting and fulfilling. If I have changed the world by
the time I die, I will rest easily. I do not ask to be remembered and
I care little if my name stays around, but I want to leave the world
a better place than it was when I entered it.
