Engineering is a Meme
Engineers are often portrayed as glasses and sweater-vest wearing white guys who spend their days looking at computers. That’s not true. You get a lot of Asians too. Just kidding. There are a lot of different people who pursue engineering. I’m a tiny Latina who can’t seem to figure out any electronics, and I’m an engineer too. Ignore the stereotypes. Engineers all have different skills. If you love that feeling you get when you finally figure something out or get something to work, that’s all you need to study engineering.
Engineering is a Profession
The benefit of engineering: it’s one of the only fields where you can graduate with a bachelor’s degree and start making $60,000+ across the board. For most other majors, you need at least a master’s degree or years of experience to get the same kind of salary. Engineers are in high demand. Our lives are more and more controlled by electronics, so demand for engineers is expected to go up in the future. The field is by its nature innovative, so engineers are constantly working on new things. It’s a pretty sweet gig.
Engineering is a Sausage-Fest
Ladies, please join me. I’m lonely. The guy to girl ratio is about 5:1. What’s even sadder is that because engineers are in high demand, women from first generation or low-income backgrounds could especially benefit from high paying and secure jobs, but oftentimes women are scared to pursue STEM. Girls are told from an early age they aren’t as good at math or science as boys. First of all, that’s ****. Second of all, you don’t have to be the best. It’s also OK to struggle and ask for help as long as you’re willing to put in the work. Diversity of any kind has been proven to improve products, so you’ll be doing us all a favor if you grit your teeth and stick to engineering.
Engineering is a Mentality
Maybe I haven’t persuaded you to become an engineer. That’s OK. Engineering is more than that. It’s the application of problem-solving skills to fix issues in a concrete way. Engineers don’t say, “Maybe we could do this.” We do (even if it doesn’t work). You don’t have to be an engineering major to be an engineer. My psych major friend called herself “a social engineer.” I laughed, but she had a point. Social engineering is “the application of sociological principles to specific social problems.”
That’s the key: problems.
Engineers are the problem-solvers. Sociologists and psychologists become engineers when they start to tackle the problems they find instead of simply observing and studying them. If everyone took a step back from their job and approached it with this problem-solving mentality, they’d probably be happier because obstacles would slowly melt away as they think of innovative solutions.
Help me redefine engineering. It’s probably worth mentioning that if you do become an engineer, you’ll never sleep again, but hey, you might create the next Google.
