• Question: What (personally) do you think makes a good engineer; what qualities do you think they should have?

    Asked by Henry to Iulia, Katie, Mateusz, Ollie, Siobhan on 9 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: Iulia Motoc

      Iulia Motoc answered on 9 Mar 2017:

      I think an engineer should have skills such like critical thinking and analytical thinking. You need these as you may need to make fast decisions, you need to find solutions to problems, you need to come up with idea of stuff you want to make.

      An engineer should be able to think about what the world needs, not what he thinks it’s cool to make.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 10 Mar 2017:

      Big question! I address academic engineers here, as I haven’t worked with many other types for that long.

      For academia, your creative approach, the ability to prototype and test your solutions, and good writing skills to tell the world about what you’ve done are important. Working in tandem with others is also a good skill to have as you start working in teams, collaborate, and visit conferences.

      I’d also include ambition, perseverance and practical approach as important, as you often need to work when things go wrong, when parts you’ve ordered are delayed or when other unforeseen events happen.

      Ideally, you’d also want your creations to help as many people as possible. We are all in business of helping somebody: phones help so many people communicate, computers do everything from work to entertainment, and satellites tell us loads about both the weather on Earth, the Sun and other planets, and about distant stars and galaxies. All of these inventions were engineering problems once (and often still are as we try to improve what they can do).

    • Photo: Siobhan Duncan

      Siobhan Duncan answered on 13 Mar 2017:

      Think is a really good, and really tricky, question 🙂

      I think we will all have different answers based on our different experiences.

      But for me it’s two things. Curiosity and patience.

      Engineering is a skill like any other, so it takes a lot of time to practice and make the skills better. You do need to spend time learning from others and trying thing out for yourself in order to learn common mistakes for yourself. Every project you work on, you will learn what you did well and what didn’t go well . Then on the next project you can take this experience and re-use the good ideas and learn from the not so good ones.

      But you also need to be curious, because you need to want to know why? Why does this work? Why do we do things this way? Why don’t we try to improve that? Why haven’t we found a solution to this common problem yet? Why does everyone solve this problem in that way and can I come up with a better solution?

      I hope that makes sense 🙂 Anything else please just ask
      Siobhan

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