• Question: What type of engineer would you be if the type of engineer was not a thing?

    Asked by TANC2009 to Oliver, Lesley, Leah, Hannah, Graeme, Aleks on 1 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by jojo.
    • Photo: Graeme Burt

      Graeme Burt answered on 1 Mar 2019:

      The more experienced you get the more the engineering subjects merge. I work with electronics at millions of volts so its really electronic and electrical, but you have to worry about heating/cooling, thermal expansion, and vibration so I do a lot of mechanical engineering, I work on particle accelerators so thats Nuclear engineering, I even do a bit of chemical engineering as we have to use acid to make the surfaces smooth. I work in a general engineering department so students get trained in them all (and I teach them all) except civil. Its the way the world is going with electronic control of mechanical systems now.

      So in short any of them except Civil (sorry Civil engineers)

    • Photo: Leah Morgan

      Leah Morgan answered on 1 Mar 2019:

      Right now I’m a diagnostic/mechanical engineer. It works quite well for me because a physics degree is really useful but there’s still lots to learn. If I had to switch to something else… I’d probably pick nuclear engineering. Nuclear physics is a lot of fun!

    • Photo: Lesley Colquhoun

      Lesley Colquhoun answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      I think you will rarely find an engineer who is “boxed” into a specific type of engineering. We apply a broad range of topics and skills to our everyday lives!

      If i could choose though, i would like to be more hands on and work with the equipment to build, operate and maintain.

    • Photo: Hannah Griffin

      Hannah Griffin answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      I totally agree with Graeme. The more experienced you get, the more projects you work on, the more the engineering subjects merge. If software engineering was not a thing then I’d be a software developer and I would steal lots of techniques from other engineering types! Seriously, a world without software? without websites? without apps for your phone? I don’t think software engineers are going anywhere….someone will need to program the programming robots for a long while yet! (Although having said this, civil engineering looks pretty interesting too. 🙂)

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