Another Cup of Coffee, Rethinking my future in Engineering

An essay I wrote in Engineering, it was supposed to be about how we feel about engineering, where we fit in etc. I thought it would make an interesting and diffrent post.

I am sitting at the campus café again. I haven’t been studying in here for a while, the engineering project have taken over my days. I am liking it however, the building process is quite fun at this stage. When I started ‘Engineering for Everyone’ in September, I had already decided what I wanted to do. I wanted to become a robotics engineer and build robots to work under extreme conditions like the ocean floor or in space. I still want to build robots, but some of my views on it have changed. I also have begun to define what sort of robots I would like to build now that I have started to realize that the dream of robotics is actually within reach and I can get there. I have also confirmed many of my earlier, such as the one that I would not do too well in a management job.

Over this year I have learned to look at engineering in ways I did not before. One such example is the reading and discussion on the Rede Lecture by C.P. Snow . Snow talks about how the two cultures, science and humanities, have been in a spilt, a war almost, for a long time. He also talks about how allplied sciences such as engineering are among the worst. I do not agree with this point. It is my belief that a few disciplines, engineering, economics and physiology to mention a few, draw upon both humanities and science. All three of them draw upon knowledge of how humans each other and their environment and science and scientific methods. Engineers need to know how the users of what they are designing will interact it the design. We got to experience these ourselves during the design project. Before I never imagined that there would be so much interaction with the client and the users.

In one of our early discussions in engineering we were talking about the different disciplines of engineering and among other things the percentage of women in the disciplines. Computer Engineering has very few women, and I have yet to figure out if that is a good or bad thing for me. However I think that more women in the field can only be good, I believe that men and women have some fundamental differences in the way they think. Judging from the people I know, they seem more able to focus at one thing at a time and women seem more able to think about many things at the same time. Having an engineering team consisting of both of those ways of think can only be good, as engineering is so much about thinking about problems in new and different ways. One could also insure that different ways of thinking is represented by using personality tests such as the Brigg Meyers test. Generally I have always been very skeptical of employers asking the works to take personality tests, but after taking the Brigg Myers test and experiencing how my group worked and feeling that I could make more sense of how we functioned together, I now think that test such as Brigg Meyers test might be good. I also believe that I am a dreamer or a visionary; I believe we can make a lot what you see in science fiction come true in the not so far future. Not only do I believe we can do it, I want to be one of the people doing it. In my essay in the beginning of the year I talked about how I wanted to build robots. A long standing dream of mine has been to build an Artificial Intelligence. Many people see it as an impossible dream, I don’t think it is. There have already been many attempts, such as Honda’s Asimo and with computer technology developing at the speed it has in the last few years, I believe humanoid robots will be a lot more common in a few years.

Over the course of this design project I have realized a few things about myself and what type of work I want to do. I do not want to be a team leader or manager. What I want to do is build and invent, and while all the paperwork is necessary, it is also very boring and time consuming. I also exprienenced that it can be limiting for the creative side of the design process. When we were in the middle of the writing of the Letter of Intent and the Proposal, I discovered that I was having problems with coming up with new ideas. I am assuming that in a team of engineers someone on the team is assigned the task of writing the important papers. The way we were doing it in the groups for the design projects, with everyone doing a bit each, seems was alright for such a small group, but I feel that it would be in efficient for a bigger team.

Over the course of this year I have started to think about my dream job. As I said in my first narrative I want most of all to design robots for use in space and following on this thought I have mostly been thinking of working for NASA, however not being an American Citizen there are several issues with this. Earlier in the year I was also thinking about working in the Norwegian petroleum industry. It has been estimated that Norway only have oil for some 50 years , but there is apparently coal underneath the oil. The only problem is that the oil and coal is in the ocean floor Norway is going to need engineers to build machines and robots to operate at these depths, since we now have seen the effects of the deep sea diving that was needed to start up the Norwegian petroleum adventure in the 1960s. When I started this course I had this kind of work in mind as a back up. Now however, after serious consideration and watching “An Inconvenient Truth”, I have changed my mind about working in that industry. The movie brought back some issues I had not considered. If you look at a map, Norway is about as far north as Greenland, the only thing that is keeping us from being a block of ice is the Gulf Stream. I feel that it would be unethical for me to be one of the engineers that facilitate further burning of fossil fuel and further destruction of the environment. Honestly, what good does it do to be the richest land in the worlds, money that we got by selling oil in the first place, if our country is buried beneath a mile of ice? Then I few days ago I read an interesting article, apparently Norway have the worlds main supply of Thorium , which can be used to produce cleaner energy than oil or coal. It also produces less waste than Uranium. From what I have read, this seems like something I can support.

Over the course of this year, I have been unsure if this was what I want to do. Is engineering really it? I am still not a hundred percent sure, but close. I have realized that it will take a lot of effort and will require that not only I but also my friends accept that I might not have that much of a social life. But with some time management it should be possible to fit friends, fun and engineering together, also because they overlap. I have become better friends with my group than I thought I would and working on the design project is fun even if it is a lot of work. Some of my morals have changed; I have gone from being willing to do anything for money to realizing that for some things the long term cost will be too great.