What Every Engineering Student Should Know By Graduation

Despite being told when we were young, and it being a common trend for many High School graduates, it's important to recognize how big a step going to college can be for your life. Not only will you be learning to actively choose to further your education, you are also going to be discovering yourself in the midst of learning high level academics that not everybody you'll encounter will understand.

To make things easier for those choosing the engineering path as I did in college, I thought I'd help by providing some of the things that I found helpful to practice while on your engineering school journey! Also note that although this post is primarily tailored for Engineers, these can also be useful for anyone in a school setting. School is there to prepare you for the real thing. Although the classroom will usually focus on theories and hypotheticals, it should also be a place to prepare your mindset and habits.

As our personalities and backgrounds can differ, so will our educational journey. You are free to determine what you find useful from this post and discard the rest.

With that being said, lets begin!

Make Mistakes

Part of being an Engineer is that you're continuously learning. Not just in the sense of learning new subjects or maintaining familiarity in your industry, but also taking note of what worked and what didn't. Engineering problems in school are meant to simulate some truth of what you'll be solving in the real world. If you get something wrong, study why that happened. Take notes of your failures. Do whatever you can to reason with yourself on why the book solution worked and yours didn't. If your instructor writes notes on your work, study them, maybe even rewrite them- You'll retain more from what you produce than what you're simply told.

We can obtain a nasty habit of trying to avoid failure early in our schooling. While I understand no one wants to repeat any courses and waste tuition money, you should be wary of becoming overly focused on the grade than your own comprehension of the subject. Failure is feedback on your study habits. Just like how you learn to walk- you won't learn your balance if you don't fall and discover the wrong ways to distribute your weight. You won't learn the subject and be prepared for the next level if you don't learn why your original thought-process didn't work.

The last thing you want to happen is to get by without knowing why. This is not just bad in the case of not comprehending a topic, but it also can affect your ability to fortify your own intellectual confidence. There will be hard days in class, so not being able to be confident of what you've learned will attribute to an imposter syndrome when asked to complete the same work. There's no shame in being rusty on topics, forgetting some content, or just needing a refresher. But to not have an idea on how to tackle a particular subject will leave you wishing you actually learned from what you didn't know.

Allow yourself to make mistakes so that you can learn from them. If you're able to, make the mistakes on purpose. The more you get from experimenting success and failure in the classroom, the less likely you are from having similar issues where your mistakes actually have more serious affects.

Become more well-rounded than just the technical stuff

Engineers are known for their complex understanding of math and science. We utilize science to create within the physical world, and we make sense of it through some crazy mathematical martial arts. In school our grades are typically quantified by our ability to solve these analytical problems, so It can be easy to get stuck on crunching equations all day when that's all you do every semester. But don't let that be your only means of practicing engineering.

There are other traits of engineering to pay attention to, like written/verbal communication, the ability to articulate your complex knowledge in easier language, and understanding the general process of prototyping and manufacturing. If you have access to tools or someone who knows them, try to get yourself familiarized. The more you get acquainted with producing, the more you'll be better at solving.

On the job it won't always be about gathering variables and using equations. But It'll always come down to if your product brought value to the public and or client. By all means, become a master of arithmetic or minor in a science, but be sure that by the end of the day you are capable of producing a quality product that not only complies with standards & safety, but can be fabricated as efficiently as possible. It'll be easier to do that if you have more skills in your arsenal to pull from.

Learn to Lead

By the time you near graduation, you should have already had a few group projects and lab work. As most instructors would claim, it's practice working as a team. I could go on-and-on about the importance of teamwork, though what isn't normally talked about -and is probably just as important- is to practice leadership.

Engineers are like the Doctors of the tech world. They have the educational know-how, in charge of designing plans, and sometimes are the ones to make the critical decisions. With this being their responsibility they must also have the capacity to lead the execution of their work through hands-on personnel like Technicians/Nurses. Although some Technicians/Nurses can be highly experienced above an engineers know-how, the engineers are still the appointed leads. Being a leader in this scenario may also get you to learn more, as it is important to recognize the individual talent in the team you have to work with.

If you're dealing with a group assignment, observe how duties are distributed, the way objectives are determined, and how information is exchanged. Learn to manage team morality and maneuver last-minute changes. Every project in general will have it's ups-and-downs, will have pivoting priorities, and teammates will call-out or even quit. It's an inevitable situation at work. It'd be better to discover how you handle those particular scenarios while in a training environment than during the real thing. Even if you never get the chance to be the team lead, it'll be a boost to your own character!

Learn to Ask Better Questions

Close mouths don't get fed! The first thing you should learn is to not be afraid to ask questions. When you get that down, learn to ask better ones. Formulating strong questions can yield stronger answers with more information to work with. Think of your questions as stress testers to your solutions. While it is acceptable to design something that works within your defined conditions, it is only when we put them under even more complex conditions can we get to understand our designs more- like where it can fail and where it doesn't!

Asking better questions can also help with breaking our habits of having tunnel vision in our approach. When we come up with a solution or approach that works in many cases, we can develop a complacency in the way we think. Just like in the classroom, we enjoy having easy problems where all we need is a set of variables we could plug into a known equation. Though if we were to conjure up some questions to broaden our understanding of what we're really trying to accomplish, we may develop other ways of solving the same problem and perhaps do it better!

An example could be like designing a faster race car. You could fixate on gathering and manipulating variables to beef-up the engine, and you may be able to achieve some performance improvements. But if you don't ask questions like ones regarding the kinds of conditions the vehicle will be under, then we wouldn't remember to consider if the tires are right for the track, if the body's center-of-gravity is distributed properly, or if the brakes could even handle the speed you're putting it up against!

The more questions we ask, the better we can make them and the easier it will be to finalize a quality design. Don't just look at completing your objectives, look at what it's success attributes too. The more you understand the end goal and what you're really solving for, the better chance you give yourself at finding better ways to get the same result. Don't worry if it's beyond your scope. The more you see the bigger picture, the better you can plan and design for it.

Engineer with Intent

To be an engineer is much more than the technical knowledge you'll obtain. It goes even beyond being capable of getting a good job after graduation. It's about utilizing the person you'll become to make a positive difference in the world.

By graduation you would have conditioned yourself to be a certified problem solver. You will have the instinct to approach challenges with the mindset of chunking things into solvable steps. You will have the sensibility to realize the implications of your actions like -will it provide benefit to the public? Is this an efficient way of going about my solution? What is the cost? Who will it affect? Where will it go when it's use has passed?

While you're fighting to stay awake in class or stressing out over studying, remember that you're in your program not just to work or to be good at numbers- you're doing it to become a better person overall. Schooling will always be hard and you will come across days where you won't understand where you're going or what you're even doing there. Look beyond the grades, and take a moment to recognize the person you're becoming.

Just like how Doctors are entrusted to heal, or Lawyers being obligated to uphold law, Engineers should be committed to innovating and advancing society. While you can take your lessons to work in tech, the skills and conditioning that you earn along the way will be capable of doing much more outside of engineering- so long as you have a deeper intent for them.

I hope you found these pointers useful for your schooling and perhaps the start of your career. Engineering is hard not just because of technicalities involved, but because of the type of person it takes to get through it. Whether you're just starting your program or graduating soon, review these tips every-so-often and reflect on your progress. You'll be surprised how much of these you'll subconsciously incorporate as you continue your path.

Thank you for taking the time to read through this! If you think there are other tips that should be included in this list, please be sure to leave a comment so we all can grow just a little better each day!