Begin with Engineering

By Boyuan Sun

“The profession in which knowledge of mathematical and natural sciences, gained by study, experience, and practice, is applied with judgment to develop ways to use, economically, the materials and forces of nature for the benefit of mankind.”

——ABET, The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology

I would love to start the topic about engineering with this short clear definition of engineering by ABET, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. As described in this definition, engineering is not something difficult, something that is far beyond your knowledge. You don’t need to be the guy who made it to moon whose distance from Earth is out of our imagination. You don’t have to build the robot which must be remote controlled from 140 million miles away. You don’t have to do those extremely difficult tasks because they will finally come to you naturally. What you need to do is to start with your very first science class and your very first math problem which we are already had in early our life.

From the data of Engineering Wrokforce Commission of the American Association of Engineering Societies, provided numbers of students in several broad engineering field, we find out that there is an increasing of number of engineering students since 2006. This suggests that there is a increasing demand in the market of engineering as the market keeps a stable percentage of the employment status. As for me, I treated it as a chance for me because I believe that more opportunities always come with even more challenges.

Come down to my major, Electrical Engineering, it is one of the most populated of the engineering disciplines which includes eight major areas: [1]
Computer
Communication
Circuits
Digital controls
Instrumentation
Signal processing
Bioengineering
Power

Those areas are widely separated considering the wide range of electronic devices we use very day. As you can see, there are so many possibilities in electrical engineering major and I can’t wait to find out which one belongs to me.


[1] William C. Oakes, Les L. Leone, Engineering Your Future: A Brief Introduction to Engineering, 5th Ed, Oxford, NY, 2015, Print.