• Question: What personal characteristics do you feel are necessary to be a successful engineer?

    Asked by John.D. Rockefeller to Sarah, Ryan, Priyanka, Paul, Chris on 14 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by 584fuee25, brooklyn99.
    • Photo: Christine Coonick

      Christine Coonick answered on 14 Mar 2016:

      Hi John,

      As I work as part of small team, sometimes there can be a lot of personality to go around. But as a general rule for engineering I think you need to be creative, resilient, adaptable, methodical, decisive and it helps to be personable too!

    • Photo: Priyanka Dhopade

      Priyanka Dhopade answered on 14 Mar 2016:

      That’s a good question. I definitely agree with Christine – all of those characteristics are pretty important.

      I would add that being curious and asking questions like “how?” and “why?” will take you far in engineering, because you’ll always need to know what the problem is so that you can design and build a solution for it.

      I also think being thorough/rigorous is important. For example, checking your calculations, and any assumptions you may have made to simplify the problem, or having someone else look them over can prevent accidents and probably stop someone from getting hurt if you’re building something that will be used by people.

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