Hug an engineer—and yourself—today

From the very first day of O-Week freshman year, I have identified as an engineer. But that didn’t stop me from doing a double take the first time I walked into EGR53. That’s not an exaggeration—I walked in, walked out, rechecked my nicely printed out schedule and walked back in. I was convinced that I was in the wrong room. Why? Everyone looked so… Normal. This reaction was especially rash when you consider that if you look up the definition of "engineer", you’re not exactly going to get “5’2, extremely loud Indian girl who always wears dresses and laughs too much”. I realized that I didn’t really know what the "engineer" stereotype involved. Who really fits into it?

For fun, I decided to search "engineer" in the Merriam-Webster dictionary and what I got was—"a person who designs and builds complicated products, machines, systems or structures; a person who runs or is in charge of an engine in an airplane, a ship, etc; a person who runs a train."

Really?

I’m not a complete fan of this definition. Although the first part is objectively accurate, I don’t ever expect to be in charge of an engine on an airplane or ship, and have zero intentions of running a train. But the real reason I don’t like the definition is because it severely undervalues what an engineer does. Maybe I’m a bit of a romantic, or maybe think just too highly of myself, but I like to think of engineers as creators of the future—those who are trying to perfect the art of turning dreams into reality. No one can deny that it’s a very practical major, or that it’s far from easy. A part of it is staying up all night in a basement with the tiniest slits for windows working on a lab report, mental breakdowns at 2 AM over four problem sets, fighting the urge to throw your laptop at the wall when you hear the MATLAB error sound for the 47th time, everyone and their mother thinking that you can have the ability to repair things—it's pushing yourself to the limit and then pushing yourself beyond it.

But what engineers really do is constantly challenge themselves and the world to be better. That relentless drive has given us our fancy new phones, the braces we had in middle school that there’s no evidence of because we deleted all the pictures, the genetically modified fruit we had as a snack earlier today, the MRI machine we lay in for an hour to earn $50 for a research study or the Walk Again Project—led by Duke’s very own Dr. Miguel Nicolelis—which allowed Juliano Pinto, a paraplegic, to open the 2014 World Cup in Brazil with a kick. And that constant push for a better world will bring us flying cars, hover boards, personalized medicine based on genetics, cleaner and more efficient energy sources, smart materials and colonies on the moon.

Communities, countries and civilizations have been built on the backs of engineers and imagination. You want a way to talk to and see your relatives thousands of miles away? Sure. Want to visualize what’s happening in a human brain? Coming right up. Artificial heart? You got it. Hover boards? Working on it—sorry McFly, we know you wanted that one by 2015.

At the end of the day, engineering is really a passionate pursuit of perfection. It’s a philosophy, a way of thinking. It is an interesting subject area that is simply never satisfied. Mr. Webster, you can quote me on that. Scott Adams once said, “Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own.” I’m with you, Scott. It seems that optimization, while perpetually the goal to work toward, is yet to be grasped. There can always be less parts, less variability, greater efficiency. Engineers are never content with the world just as it is. It is in that way that the most beautiful thing about engineering becomes increasingly clear—it is not just in the obvious, but in everything around us.

That being said, I want to make another point—since there is a little bit of engineering in everything around us, there is a little bit of engineer in all of us. After all, if there’s anyone who can create a problem where there isn’t one, it would be my high school English teacher who insisted that the color of the curtains were a secret message from the author about how anguished the protagonist truly was.