It’s difficult to describe the inner workings of the engineer. Peering
through his glasses may seem like looking for what Alice found through
the looking glass.
Basically, an engineer is someone who applies scientific or
mathematical principles to develop solutions that are useful. To meet
this noble goal, the engineer has to see a world that has never been,
in order to create it. The best practices to achieving this include
‘concretizing’ mathematical models, processes, methodologies, reasoning
and imagination.
As an engineer, I know that this required out-of-box thinking can make
us seem rather eccentric. Many of us reason in Boolean logic, some of
us jot down queer looking notes on napkins during dinner parties and
some (a lot less) wake up, lying next to their dog.
A true engineer is born and not made. You notice their inquisitive and creative minds even when they are very young.
You know you are one when:
1. The first thing you do after waking up is pull down your white board, recompile the Linux kernel or start AutoCAD.
2. If you’d rather fix your car (with all the extra gizmos you installed) than go to the mechanic.
3. You prefer to use Gauss-Jordan elimination to solve simultaneous equations.
4. You have worked extensively with MathLab at some point in your life.
5. And you’ll rather grab an AMD Opteron quad-core than grab a bikini-clad Angelina Jolie.
It’s the passion and sense of responsibility that drives us.
From designing a new coffee-maker to building the next Taj-Mahal to
working on avionics for the next generation of Tomcat bomber jets.
Getting those thermodynamic, torsion and discrete math equations right
could be the difference between a happy or a burnt home, losing or
winning a raging war, and uplifting a nation in its entirety.
I’d like to give kudos to the lady engineers. The ones who took up this
gargantuan profession despite all the odds. The ones with pencils in
their ears whilst wearing high-heeled shoes. A lady engineer is
courageous, motivated and adept at work; she understands people and
real-world issues and expresses her abstract thoughts even more
fluently. She is firm and yet quite tender.
If Alice was an Engineer,
she would have told Humpty Dumpty she could put him together again and so thereby shorten the poem.
Engineers have some rather exceptional traits.
An excellent engineer, more than anyone else thinks in paradigms. We
have the ability to pull together and apart any object or situation
with just our imagination. We dream the dreams of giants and we can see
greatness in the modest.
To my fellow engineers – Though the world around you may not understand
you quite as much as you understand it, remember that most of us were
born well before our time and that God loves the Engineer more than any
other profession because we live out the Creator’s first commandment.
Also there’s a divine perk to the profession -- God is an Engineer. All engineers go to heaven.
