document updated 14 years ago, on Sep 4, 2011
I am thoroughly and profoundly an engineer. There are several engineering fields I enjoy studying, and I also enjoy the commonalities between them, and being able to see how engineering works from an overhead view of its varied sub-fields.
Software engineering
My career is in software engineering.
My father is also a software engineer, and this was one of our father/daughter activities from early on.
Safety engineering
For some reason, I have always been drawn to risky activities. I remember the day I was sitting in motorcycle class, and I realized that one could approach risk-management from a rigorous academic perspective. I've been hooked ever since.
Structural engineering
Play the Bridge Builder games. Seriously, I don't know how anybody could NOT want to be a structural engineer after playing those.
Figuring out how and why something fails is very educational. But engineering failures in other fields are kind of ho-hum compared to failures in structure engineering.
Mechanical engineering
There are two patterns in my life that relate to this:
- I love vehicles in almost any form.
- I do a lot of improvisation. I'm a MacGyver engineer.
So I end up improvising or altering vehicles. So, by necessity, I've been learning more mechanical engineering.