With my distaste of engineering manifesting itself recently, I thought I would take some time to list the grievances I have with engineering. Here goes.
- With science, there is only one answer. The world has many problems that need to be solved. If you were to give six groups of scientists the same problem, they would come up with the same answer. If you were to give six groups of engineers the same problem, you would get six completely different answers (as evidenced by my senior design class this semester), and there would be absolutely no rules or standards to determine which was the best solution. There is far too much ambiguity in engineering.
- Science is forever. If you make a breakthrough in engineering, you change the world for the near future. Somebody will just come along and make something better than your thing in a few years. The cycle never ends. If you make a breakthrough in science, it changes the world FOREVER. Besides, it's the scientists that are defining the work that the engineers are doing.
- There is too much pressure in engineering. Scientists have been looking for the Higgs boson for what, sixty? Seventy years? If it were an engineering problem, they would have given up after a month. Scientists can devote their lives to figuring out one thing that really drives them. If you can't get a problem figured out quickly as an engineer, the company loses money, and you're out of a job.
- Science is just plain cooler. I mean, this is probably pretty subjective, but uncovering the secrets of the universe is much more amazing than doing things like designing heat exchangers and high-lift devices with your life.
Another I have isn't so much a grievance as it is an observation. To be successful as an engineer, you MUST be 100% passionate about machines, especially the one you are devoting your life to designing. The only machine I have ever been 100% passionate about is race cars. I studied engineering because I wanted to design formula race cars. As I grow older and wiser (I know, a laughable claim considering that I am only 23), I realize the last thing I want to do is follow that dream. I love auto racing! And I would never be able to enjoy watching a race again if I were to actually work in auto racing someday.
I was going to comment on this with a discussion of some of the points, but we already did that in person. Lol. I'll just give a quick breakdown so it's documented in writing. ;)
ReplyDelete1) In science, there are often competing ideas about how the world works. Sometimes, you've got two scientists trying to do very different things. But usually the data ends up supporting one or the other. Really, as a scientist you've got X, a toolbox of techniques, and your job is to find Y, some data of interest (that will support or refute your hypothesis). Your job is to find out how to find Y using X, taking any route you please. So in some ways there are "many answers." But I think you've got the idea.
2) Eh... Science is an ever-changing field. The beauty of science is that it's really not forever. It adapts to account for any new data. Theories-- even big ones-- get refuted. At the forefront of scientific research, most knowledge is overturned in a matter of a decade or less. Larger, more profound discoveries tend to stick around for a while longer, and are often still applicable even if they're not perfectly accurate.
3) I agree, you can dedicate your entire life to a LARGE question in science, whereas in engineering you have to shift between many different (if related) problems. But in science, you're tackling a lot of different small problems to answer your big question.
4) Well. Yeah. ;)
And, again, as discussed in person:
ReplyDelete1.) What I was alluding to was that, given the same tools, every engineer will come to a different conclusion to the same problem, whereas in science, you typically come to the same answer, despite what tools you have available.
2.) I at least meant that it was longer term than is engineering. If Einstein were an engineer, his work in the 1890s would have been replaced long ago. His work in relativity still stands, though. The smaller discoveries don't last long, but no discovery in engineering lasts long.
3.) As an engineer, if something is huge and important to you personally, you just won't be given the resources to accomplish the goal.