The Making of a Good Engineer

Many people - including some in the professional circuits - take and think of an engineer as a know-it-all person on a specific field, a notion perhaps stemming from the fact that mostly in the past century, a shadow of a well studied individual was cast on whomever made it through the years of college or university education.

I strongly cater to the idea that it is not the schooling what makes an engineer - studying only serves to open up the thinking horizon of the individual, that's it; the real value of an engineer is in a person that knows where to look for the tools and other resources to resolve a problem.

Back in school one of my favorite experiences when facing an exam was when the 'open-book' option was thrown in; I always have seen this a as true test of character for prospective engineers - there were some students that even as they were savvy individuals with a good deal of theoretical knowledge, they got not so brilliant results when faced with a real-world problem that strayed away from the beaten path, a slew of books in hand and yet some solutions escaped them; they did not know how to effectively search for the tools they needed. Then there were the goof-ball types that despite having severe long term memory problems (too much partying out maybe?) managed to whiz by the tests just by effectively applying the resources at hand.

Of my earliest experiences on the wrongly perceived notion about what a good engineer is, was while working at an AM/FM combo radio station. There was a problem with interference from an adjacent channel on the FM operation and the engineer on the task of investigating the problem got hold of a very nifty and top of the line Spectrum Analyzer (lent by a big name garage door openers manufacturer's lab BTW - we had none in our arsenal at that station). I was observing from a distance as he setup the SA and checked the immediate field to our center channel; one of the sales managers walked by and saw the big box, the blinking lights and the live trace on the screen and stood by to see what was going on. A couple of minutes later my friend finished doing the analysis and while printing out the results the manager with some awe asked if we had learned to do this at school - "no" said my friend, "we did not had access to such equipment there, maybe a digital storage scope or two but that was it". The sales guy was a bit dumbfounded about the whole thing and uttered that he thought that the college we had attended to was up to the latest and greatest, which it was not (really)... but the bottom line is that even as that was the first time we ever touched a SA, there were tools on the side to help us out do the job: the user manual and some theory we had gleaned from assorted books and from playing with scopes and curve tracers a couple of years before that.

One of my favorite teachers back in college once told the class: "kids, you have to be ready to face the challenges in your productive life up ahead, be ready for anything; just because you will graduate as Industrial Engineers doesn't mean you won't be able to function in other areas, this what we see here in the classroom only shows you a very narrow approach at a thinking process - you will have to develop and nurture your own. I am a chemical engineer, teaching materials management here and working also as a process engineer making flutes and clarinets". Those words from Mr. Machado - may he rest in peace - left a mark on me, and to this day I deem them as one of the most valued concepts I ever followed up upon.