How Do You Know If You’re an Engineer?

I’m an engineer, and I’ve met a lot of them. One thing I’ve noticed is that many of the engineers I know started out heading in a completely different direction in their career, but then somehow ended up becoming an engineer.

It’s often some variant of this story: “One day, I had a problem to solve, and I tried to solve it on my own. I discovered these tools that people use to build solutions, like writing code, and I learned how to use them to solve my problem. I got pretty good at using the tools, and I discovered that what I’d been doing is engineering.”

Engineering is inventing and building things that solve problems for people

Often that person hadn’t thought of becoming an engineer before. Maybe they didn’t think they would like engineering or would be good at it. Or they compared themselves to other people who had always known that they wanted to be engineers, and they didn’t think they were like them.

When I hear stories like that, I feel good about how engineering has drawn so many people from diverse paths in life. On the other hand, the more stories I hear like that, the more I realize that it’s also a symptom of a problem: Why do so many people start off thinking that engineering isn’t for them?

Like if millions of people had never tasted vanilla ice cream and were avoiding it just because they thought it looked like something they wouldn’t enjoy. This is not a perfect analogy of course because, strictly speaking, we don't actually need vanilla ice cream (though you may disagree).

What’s been happening is that there is a certain type of person who finds the tools of engineering fun in and of themselves, and this type of person has become the poster child for engineering. This impression was only reinforced by the way computer science introductory courses were taught, narrowing the field’s appeal. Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, observed, “In the past we presented computer science as interesting just for its own structure. That was very effective at attracting white and Asian men to the discipline, but only a subset of them, and it was generally not effective for women or people of color.”

By now everybody is awake to the fact that we need more engineers and that the field of engineering suffers from a lack of diversity. If so many people—who would actually enjoy being engineers and who would be good ones—are avoiding trying engineering because they think they won’t like it, then how are you going to get more engineers?

“The reality is, if tech companies can’t persuade more women and people of color to major in computer science, they are not going to be able to fill the positions that they have.” ―Maria Klawe

One approach to tackling the problem is to identify and eliminate barriers that are keeping some people out of engineering. Roll out the welcome mat, and maybe offer free scoops of vanilla ice cream.

But that can’t be the entire strategy. Even if every impediment to becoming an engineer could be eliminated, if people don’t think of themselves as future engineers, too many will just walk right past your welcome mat saying, “Thanks, but I don’t think that engineering is for me. And even though I’ve never tried it before, vanilla ice cream doesn’t look like something I’d enjoy, either.”

Debbie Sterling, founder of GoldieBlox, personally related to that sentiment, saying, “I was always an engineer, but I just didn’t know it.”

She explains, “Well, when I was a little girl, I wasn’t interested in engineering.” However, she was interested in expressing her creativity and building things, such as when she and her two best friends built a three-part Chinese dragon Halloween costume out of cardboard boxes. But she didn't recognize this as having anything to do with engineering.

But fortunately she had a high school math teacher who advised her, “You should try engineering. I think you would like engineering.” So she tried it in college, and found that she loved inventing and making things and coming up with machines. She hadn’t thought that engineering was for her until she realized that it’s not only about the tools. Engineering is for people.

What all the different paths that have led to people becoming engineers have in common is this insight that sparks the interest, the awareness that there is a greater purpose in building things that people need, not just that typing is more fun when everything is {surrounded by {curly} braces}.

Schools of engineering and computer science have started to apply this insight to how they teach the subject. At Harvey Mudd, “We also started emphasizing more practical applications in introductory classes,” said president Klawe, “When you start to make the argument that computer science is worth studying because of the things you can do with it, you attract not only more women but also a lot of men who wouldn’t have been interested in the usual approaches.”

The recognition of what engineering is for is actually the deeper understanding, and the older introduction is really the more narrow and superficial one. The new curriculum sounds like it will benefit all engineers, not just the female or minority ones. And in turn, the field of engineering is made better by attracting a more balanced pool of talent coming from a wider variety of perspectives.