<p>To be honest, I'm a little tired of hearing all the negative stuff people have to say about xxxxx profession. So I though maybe we could all talk about the positive parts of engineering (or CS) :)</p>
<p>For example, why did you go into/want to go into STEM? What is best the part of your job? What has been your favorite engineering class in college? What is your greatest career accomplishment so far? Stories to share? etc...</p>
<p>Nothing negative please!</p>
<p>I love working on video games, and I will soon find my BSCS…Then I might go for a Masters.</p>
<p>When I was working in the private-sector (non-INTEL/defense), I loved learning about a certain industry while designing and developing a system for them. For instance, I was developing data warehouses for insurance, pharmaceutical and healthcare companies. Before you can develop the system, you had to get a basic knowledge of each industry’s business processes. Learning the business processes was one of the things I liked. Another thing I liked was seeing workers of those industries actually using the data as information and generating the reports needed to make their business decisions. It was great seeing those employees staring with basically paper folders (for years) to now having a fully operational data system that they could rely on.</p>
<p>Now once I switched over to the INTEL/defense side of things, I like how the work I do help support the various national security missions for the country. Of course, there are many details that I cannot speak on because I work in a classified setting, but let’s just say it’s cool that your work is pretty much tied to some of the social and political happenings of the world.</p>
<p>What has been your favorite engineering class in college?..I have to say that my Optimization course (also called Operations Research or Mathematical Programming or Linear Programming) was my favorite undergraduate engineering course. In graduate school, my Systems Engineering I & II courses were my favorite courses because I was finally able to learn everything about something I had been doing at work for years, but always doing bits a pieces. The courses allowed me to learn about all aspects.</p>
<p>What is your greatest career accomplishment so far?..The successful implementation of a data warehouse for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. I was the technical project manager as well as the data architect and also performed database development duties. I have a greater accomplishment on the INTEL side but I cannot give details on that on this board.</p>
<p>Good things are that it pays well, is challenging, and has better job prospects than the liberal arts or business (undergrad). There are so many different things you can work on and you can show concrete results. This is what made me decide upon engineering.</p>
<p>Also, there is no politics. Professors do not expect you to write essays conforming to their liberal views. Instead, it is about building things and making them work.</p>
<p>One of my favorite projects working as an engineer (EE): This is the late 1990’s. The company I worked for (since defunct, unfortunately, it was a great place to work) made pipe-lined image processing boards that were the state of the art at the time. A large European company bought our hardware to create a banknote (i.e. paper money) defacement detection system to be integrated into the money-sorting machines that were their prime business. The target customer was a Middle-Eastern country that didn’t like folks drawing mustaches and eyeglasses on the picture of the King on the money. Our job was to detect the defaced bills and cull them out.</p>
<p>Well, as often happens, the date the system was to ship was approaching and the system didn’t quite work. I took five trips to England over a four month period, working 15 hour shifts during the night to get it to work, while the manufacturing guys worked on the system during the day. It sounds grueling, and it was, but it was also a blast. We would sleep till three o’clock in the afternoon, get up and eat a full English breakfast complete with a pint of beer, then head to work for the night. I put on a lot of weight but there is absolutely nothing better than fried eggs, a fried tomato, baked beans, toast and beer at 3:00 in the afternoon.</p>
<p>Anyway, there is a certain camaraderie that develops in situations like this, and only in them (the only other time I’ve experienced it was in the military.) Every night, we would be given literally millions of dollars worth of foreign money with which to test the system; we’d pass it through the system so many times that eventually the money would break in half, or even explode into fragments (ever try to put together a $1000 bill like a jigsaw puzzle? We did.) We were constantly brainstorming ideas to solve problems; trying things out, and when we solved a minor roadblock it was a victory for the whole team. At one point, one of the engineers had a brilliant idea to run to Radio Shack for resistors and capacitors to make a simple low-pass filter; this was to solve a problem with an OS that was sending signals at too high a rate. And it worked.</p>
<p>One night, the building guard was either absent or asleep and we couldn’t get in. But we had to get in, because the system had to ship. So one of the English engineers broke into the place by scaling a wall and unlocking the place from the inside; again, the kind of stuff I only saw in the military. When we got the thing finally working, there was a sense of satisfaction that one only rarely achieves. This is what engineering is all about…</p>
<p>I’ve posted this story on my door at work (I teach CS/EE stuff). Wonderful!</p>
<p>"Also, there is no politics. Professors do not expect you to write essays conforming to their liberal views. Instead, it is about building things and making them work. "</p>
<p>^^ That is one of the reasons I steered towards something STEM related. Math is the great equalizer.</p>
<p>Great story DMT117.</p>