• Question: Tell me about your experience in dealing with routine engineering work. How do you keep from getting bored?

    Asked by 257satm36 to Helen, Hollie, Phil, Steve, Sylwia on 14 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Helen O'Brien

      Helen O'Brien answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      Luckily the projects I am working on are all a bit different, so there is always new challenges to face. Often coming across something I have done before is a relief as it makes the problem easier and faster to solve. But I find enough variety to keep me interested.

    • Photo: Sylwia Nikel

      Sylwia Nikel answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      Well, we all have these tasks that are repetitive and we aren’t often the happiest to do them. They are however part of the job and they ensure everything runs smoothly. At the same time now with digital technology being very advanced, we can automate lots of those tasks… so you can actually turn them to fun to find a solution to automate and then move to do something else while the computer will do the “boring” stuff.
      Still, even if I wasn’t able to automate these things, the projects I’m working are often different to each other and the people I work are also new, so this makes even repetitive task a new challenge.

    • Photo: Hollie Heard

      Hollie Heard answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      Some engineering can be repetitive, (I’m running the same experiment every day at the moment), but you just have to keep sight of why you are doing it, why it is important, and what it might help you to achieve. It can also throw up the odd challenge to be solved or unexpected result so that always keeps me on my toes! As Helen has said, quite often we are working on lots of different things at the same time so there are always new challenges to be faced and new things to learn so it rarely gets boring. Sometimes when you sit down to do those ‘routine’ tasks you can also come up with some really interesting ideas or solutions as your brain is working in the background. No matter how routine or boring it seems, in engineering, everything you do is important, whether it’s installing somethings that could hurt someone or admin things like budgets and time sheets! What do you do to stop yourself getting bored with you school work?

    • Photo: Steve Williams

      Steve Williams answered on 20 Mar 2018:

      I have to admit that testing can be a bit boring, particularly when the test results are good. The whole point of testing is to gain confidence that what you have build is reliable and when you don’t find bugs (software defects) you tend to think your tests are good enough. Sometimes the tests can take several days and I wouldn’t want to sit around doing nothing waiting for the results. With lengthy tests I tend to run them overnight or over a weekend and just look in on them every once in a while.

Comments