For the next 30 days, I will attempt to post 1 new blog each day about the same general topic. This in itself is an endeavor for me since I am a full time staff engineer for a large structural engineering firm, so it makes sense that the easiest thing for me to write about is engineering since I am professional in my field of work. In fact, I'm typing this at 230 pm on a train ride to my next job site where I'll be on scaffold suspended off of a residential high rise in NYC. This post is broken up into several sections so if you want to get to the meat of it, skip to section 2.

1. INTRODUCTION

I don't know many people who knew off the bat that they wanted to be an engineer as a kid and I certainly never entertained the idea until I was 17 when I started applying for universities. I would wager that most parents told their kids to be something that makes them happy, makes good money and isn't stressful.

Unfortunately, the trifecta of all three is a surmounting task that becomes more difficult each day with inflating currency, unsteady economic policy and increasing mechanization/digitization of work. As white collar workers, we'll end up having to manage more because we'll have the assistance of ever more powerful computers and better programming to help organize our workflow. This however, is not unique to engineering. In fact engineering is one of the more robust fields in this regard.

Regardless of how you eventually stumbled onto the idea that you wanted to be an engineer, here's the first thing you might run into.

2. WHICH FIELD OF ENGINEERING?

There are dozens of specific types of engineering fields that you can choose to study, but the major ones that you find at most universities are:

Mechanical
Civil
Chemical
Biomedical
Aerospace
Nuclear

While this list is not complete, civil and mechanical are by far the most popular because they have the highest availability of jobs, which also means they tend to pay the least since the work is more competitive. Regardless of which you choose, all of these fields have one thing in common, which is the job description. An engineer's primary task is to understand the systems they are supporting so they can modify its original design, or troubleshoot it. In some cases engineers work with scientist and researchers to develop new technology and applications, but this is a niche field that often requires PhD level study.

3. WHAT I DO AS A CIVIL ENGINEER

Let me give you a very brief example in my field, which I will be digging deeper into each day. I am a civil engineer but I work specifically with structural framing of free standing objects. 99% of my work involves buildings and in some rare cases, I've worked on non building structures such as flag poles or large pieces of art. This type of engineering is called structural engineering, where as other fields within civil engineering include the design of highways and roads, bridges and tunnels, water resources and other infrastructure intended to support civilization.

Two of my friends studied mechanical engineering in college. One specializes in power plants and the other in the mechanical needs of a building, also called MEP. The power plant engineer works on maintaining the operation of power plants which largely invovles understanding thermodynamic cycles. The MEP engineer or "Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, designs a buildings macro scale MEP needs such as the cooling system, major electrical distribution, and working fluid needs.

Regardless of your function, all subsets stem from the same major, which is part of the reason why engineering is such a difficult field. There is a massive body of knowledge that you are expected to draw from and utilize in your career. But that knowledge allows you to pick where you want to end up.

So hopefully you see that if you want to be an engineer, you'll find yourself surprised by how many different aspects to engineering there actually are. The subsets all have different pros and cons within themselves but moving forward I'll be talking specifically about civil engineering and I'll give you inner secrets that you would of never known about this world.

My next article will focus on the formal education aspects of becoming an engineer, so if you want to learn more about how to become an engineer, follow me and stay tuned. There will be 1 new article each day that digs deeper into engineering.

RANDOM PHOTO OF TODAY'S JOB WHERE I INSPECT DETERIORATED CONCRETE ON A BALCONY