In any given week, I’d say I only do about 15 minutes of real, actual, work. The rest of the time I’m just doing my job. And I like my job.
Many people ask me what I do, and the usual answer is “I design cargo systems.” The usual response is something like “Oh, that’s cool,” but I can see the internal response on their face: booooooooring. I’ll agree that to most people the statement is definitely boring on the surface, which is partly why say it. Most people don’t care, and I don’t feel like explaining to them and watching their eyes glaze over. But since I started this blog as more of a technical blog than personal (though I’ve posted more personal than technical lately) I’ll take the time to go into some details of exactly what I do, while attempting to prevent comatose boredom.
At this point I’ve realized that this post is about to embark on an adventure through the depths of my very being. It is not going to be short by any means. Since I’m normally long worded anyway, I think it will be a good idea to cut this up into a few different posts.
When you break down the general “Engineering” field, you get a number of specific disciplines:
- Agricultural
- Biological
- Biomedical
- Chemical
- Civil
- Computer
- Electrical
- Environmental
- Industrial Systems
- Materials
- Mechanical & Aerospace
- Nuclear & Radiological
Most of these disciplines cover a wide range of studies, and after graduating you either go to grad school or you go to work for an industry for a specific topic within your discipline. However, there are a few disciplines that actually require significant knowledge of other disciplines. I like to call these the MMA fighters of the engineering world. IMO, these are Biomedical, Electrical, Chemical, and Mechanical, but I like to consider mechanical engineering the world champ of the MMA disciplines.
You’ll just have to wait for my next post to hear why.
Thanks for including electrical.