What comes to your mind when you hear the word engineering?

Question: What comes to your mind when you hear the word engineering?
- Keywords:
  engineering
Asked by anon-74893 on 22 Jun 2020.
- Rosina Simmons answered on 22 Jun 2020:
  
  ‘Problem solving’.
  
  Engineers are professional problem solvers. Either for fixing something that already exists, or creating something new to overcome a challenge.
- April Redford answered on 22 Jun 2020:
  
  “Team working” as I very rarely will be working alone to delivery a project. I work as part of a highways team but also with many other teams to provide the best solutions/designs that we can.
- Leah Edwards answered on 22 Jun 2020:
  
  Ooh, great question!
  
  For me, engineering is all about making things. So I think about looking up from all of my engineering drawings and calculations and seeing the thing that they made possible. It’s a very proud feeling.
- Steve Cottam answered on 22 Jun 2020:
  
  agree with the ‘problem solving’
  
  another one is identifying what the ‘actual’ problem is!
- Chris Bates answered on 22 Jun 2020:
  
  At a University open day (10 years ago now!) a lecturer gave a talk saying that we should think of Engineering as ‘Ingenuity’ – that is being clever, original and inventive. That has always stuck with me.
- anon answered on 22 Jun 2020:
  
  Many words come to mind: creative, innovative, problem-solving, teamwork, ingenuity, unique, world-leading, and many more.
- Oana Lazar answered on 22 Jun 2020:
  
  “Surprising” – it never ceases to amaze me how even just at university, where we’re all being taught the same things and given the same task descriptions, we all bring completely different ideas and interpretations to the table, with every single project ending up being unique. It’s a field which changes so quickly, and where each problem and solution is so new and different, that you never know when something you learned many years ago and thought was completely random and irrelevant might suddenly be the perfect idea and revolutionise a field. It’s definitely exciting!
- Juan Carlos Fallas-Chinchilla answered on 22 Jun 2020:
  
  Lots of things at once: passion, knowledge, creativity, silliness, ground breaking, safety, collaboration and definitely: hard work 🙂
- Fidel Olaye answered on 23 Jun 2020:
  
  Identifying problems and fixing them using innovation when needed.
- Nicola Grahamslaw answered on 27 Jun 2020: last edited 27 Jun 2020 12:44 pm
  
  I think in English we have a problem because a lot of people who don’t know much about engineers think of engines! Did you know that in a lot of other languages the two words don’t sound similar at all?
  
  The word “engineer” actually comes from the word “ingenuity” which is all about problem-solving.
- Asha Panchal answered on 3 Jul 2020:
  
  Thinking outside the box.
  Engineering is about identifying the problem, finding a solution, and then spending more time thinking about how to improve on that standard solution to be more innovative, economical, efficient, sustainable, time-saving… the list goes on!
- Katie Sparks answered on 9 Jul 2020:
  
  Making things happen
  
  I studied physics at University and I really enjoyed finding out about how things work and what people thought may be how the world is, but I’m not a natural “explorer” of thoughts.
  
  I like to think of science as “What is going on here?” and engineering as “How am I going to do that?”

Comments

Kaya commented on 30 Jun 2020:

Working together towards solving problems of the modern day world to create a better society. Even though the term ‘engineers’ covers a wide range of sectors in which we all work, we are all aiming for a common goal of improving the world we live in today for the communities we are all apart of.

Question: What comes to your mind when you hear the word engineering?