The missing basics presentations was a very powerful tool that made feel like I am going to be an engineer. It talks about all the complex skills an engineer should posses besides math and science. It is a cool presentation that takes away the feeling that by the end we will all be nerds that know only math and science. Unfortunately though, there were some missing basics mentioned that were so obviously missing in me as well. So here are those basics and my plan to fix them.
Inability to Decompose
I have a problem with this one because whenever I see a project, I tend to think how impossible it is. When we started our group discussions in iefx teams (mine is ts 1 by the way), people talked about really cool stuff like moving couches, hovercrafts , cars, trains and all that and the first thing that came to me was how difficult those projects would be. To get past this attitude, I plan to think those projects as step by step guides which take time and effort, yet is manageable once the right steps are applied. I plan to involve more in class discussions and help to decompose complicated projects. By doing so I won’t be that intimidated by them and hopefully embrace those projects and motivate myself to work on them.
Inability to Measure
There is this misconception that engineering is about sitting in front of a computer and simply applying math and science information. One part of engineering is that; however, I shouldn’t forget that engineering is about serving the society we live in and therefore we have to go out and explore the environment in which we will do some projects. In order to get better at measuring stuff in my surroundings, I plan to attend engineering clubs that are closely related to the places people live in. One club I think of now is the engineering without borders club which specifically designs projects according the poor surroundings people live in. I believe inability to measure is closely related to inability to observe and analyze.
Inability to Communicate
This is one of the hardest challenges I will be facing throughout my entire time in US. As an engineering student, I have limited language skills anyway but more importantly, as an international student I am not even sure if my English skills will ever match one of a local person. In order to improve my communications skills, I need to take classes that would require analysis and expression of that analysis. As a plan I plan to take a class about Greek Mythology which is a topic I am interested in and also something I can analyze and draw conclusions from. Communications can not only be improved by English skills. I also need to study hard and have insight on the engineering material we will be discussing. Therefore I plan to take special care in the reading assignments so I can organize my thoughts beforehand and share them in class more conveniently.
As a result I checked the curriculum of electrical engineering and saw that I have 30 hours of electives that I can fill. I plan to fill them with lessons that would help me express myself more clearly because whether it is labeling, modeling or decomposing, engineers will use their mouth to do them in a group project. I wish there would be a special symbol language that engineers would use but there aren’t any so let me get ready for my analysis courses.
