What Goes On Inside An Engineer’s Head – Being An Engineer

Since you have been reading a lot about prevailing technologies and scientific feats on this website, we thought it was about time we talked about engineers minus all the technical mumbo jumbo. For the sake of all engineers out there, we have decided to start this series that we’ll be naming as “Being An Engineer” and be assured, it will be something exquisite and witty.

The purpose of this series is to bring the dilemma that we engineers have to face, to the notice of general public and help them realize how amazing engineers really are. As an engineering student, after countless sleepless nights and being overrun by projects and deadlines along with the increasing pressure of maintaining the social life and finishing up on projects, it is no wonder that engineers are thoroughly challenged (for the lack of a better word).  By no means are we implying that us, engineers, are lacking in any aspect (well a few, but oh well). We are merely stating the issues that we have to deal with on a daily basis!

At the time of starting this post, we were all excited and pumped up, but now it feels like we are just beating around the bush. This is what we go through with every project in life – some tough life we are living. Most of the engineers find it quite hard to remain motivated for so long; engineering is like a leech that will suck you dry if you let it. Trust us, you regularly need to watch Rocky movies to keep yourself motivated and from going insane – Rocky 6 Speech does the trick mostly, but, to each his own. You start off a project and you are all hyper and excited but, all of a sudden, you are struck by a revelation: “What am I doing with my life? I have no friends, no time for myself and all that I’m doing is taking readings and making these stupid graphs.” And, did we mention that your supervisors are there to turn you into their own personal comic relief or to let you have glimpses of what hell is like? Expect no help, no guidance but you are in real trouble if you do something wrong. The supervisor won’t believe you didn’t know some tiny details or the fact that you are handling a huge project that you have no idea about and are still messing up with it. Exactly, just like this paragraph is going haphazardly and without any sense of direction is how an engineer swims his way across the burning lava they call ‘project’. So next time you see an engineer who’s working on something that you find ‘fascinating’ and think of asking him “Hey, what’s this and what does this do?”, do us all a favor and please don’t. You have no idea what kind of emotional roller-coaster ride the engineer goes through while trying to reply to your question. There’s hurt, anger, desperation, the need to bang head on the wall and well there’s this sweet sense of knowing that I’ve done something. What that something is I don’t know, but sure as hell I’ve done something helpful for this project.

By now you must be questioning the decision you made to read the post and wondering what this rattling is about! Well, folks, welcome to the mind of an engineer where the thought process is going on with the speed of light. Things that the engineer can’t explain to you but things that are important – or at least the engineer considers them to be. What was the point of this post? Nothing much really, we just felt like writing something about engineers and shall continue to do so. Like many other projects that we engineers undertake and materialize, we are not sure what good this will do; the idea is to come up with something that allows non-engineers to understand how a mind of an engineer works, until next time when we’ll talk about the annoying things that non-engineers say to engineers.