Synthesis

There are many obstacles that people around the world face. These obstacles can range in difficulty, and a lot of them affect people on an everyday basis. These issues can be as large as climate change or an energy crisis or can be as small as getting to work on time every morning. Engineers have a goal to solve these issues around the world and devise new ways to solve issues in order to benefit humankind. This is the beauty of engineering, a group of people spending their time trying to ease the life of everyone else. Over the course of our blog, we have learned the truth of engineering. Engineering is an extremely broad field that many people can get into, and it has a large impact on everyday lives.

If there is one thing that we have all taken away from this blog, it is that engineering is an immensely broad field. Between the four of us, we each covered three relatively basic types of engineering: mechanical, biomedical, and packaging. However, what we did not realize is that there are nearly endless types of engineering that are unknown to the average person. There are four main types of engineering that almost every other form of engineering branches off of:

1. Mechanical
2. Electrical
3. Civil
4. Chemical

These four basic branches expand into a tree that covers well over 40 different specific types of engineering. When first going into a main branch, most students do not know exactly what they want to focus on in their career. Sub-branches, or disciplines, can be as specific as petroleum, oil, and gas to surveying engineering. A student can also chose to stay at a wider level of engineering by only studying one of the four main branches, while always having the freedom to choose a discipline of their liking. A majority of the time, engineers in the professional field will find themselves working outside of the specific discipline that they studied in college. See this post to read about Yusheng Feng, who is a good example of this. Feng is a mechanical engineer using his knowledge to create new forms of cancer treatment. Currently, Feng has created a laser treatment that can used as a substitute to chemotherapy. Through our research, we have realized the wide reach of engineering that is open to anyone willing to take the necessary steps.

Another realization that we had during our blog is that engineering is a field for almost anyone. There are many stereotypes that lie within engineering, and you can read about those in this post written by Noemi. However, as the post reinforces, many of these stereotypes are fictional. Engineering is a field that is open to almost anyone, regardless of intelligence or gender. Since it is such a broad subject that reaches almost all aspects of everyday life, it is not hard for someone to find a niche in the field that they can specialize in. Many students struggle in finding something they are passionate about. But, once they have discovered their passion, there is a high chance that it can be applied to the field of engineering. Another common misconception of the engineering field is that it is a profession only for men. Obviously this is not a true statement. However, due to this misconception, there is a very low percentage of women found within engineering. There are many people who recognize this problem and are thinking of innovative ways to begin reversing the stigma. This project has showed us the truth behind the engineering field. This is a field that is so broad and applicable that anyone can become a part of it.

Finally, one of the biggest revelations we discovered when writing our blog was the significance and impact engineering has on society and the world. When researching different topics for our blog, we learned about the many positives that engineering has brought to the world. Some of these include vehicles that use electricity rather than fossil fuels and the ability to study mental illnesses like never before with the creation of brain organoids. Engineering has the capability to impact areas as great as these, but it also has small undetected influences on how we go about our everyday lives. Check out this post that Buck wrote about how engineering is being applied to traffic. If you think about the things you do on a daily basis, it wouldn’t be too hard to see the influences engineering has. For example, the very first thing you hear in the morning is probably something created by an engineer. In the 1800s, a mechanical engineer invented the alarm clock, which is an idea that is used by people every single day. Throughout this project, it was easy for us to see just how big of an impact engineering has on people’s everyday lives.

Over the last ten weeks, the four of us have had the opportunity to dive deeper into the field of our future careers. This process has been extremely beneficial for us all. We have learned the many misconceptions of engineering, the style of writing required for the field, the education we will need, how to communicate within the field, and we have learned about specific jobs that help us see what things we don’t want and direct us towards what we do. In the end, the truth about the field of engineering became clear to us all. And that engineering is a career that holds endless possibilities, open for anyone, and it is something that has an everyday impact on almost everyone.