It’s not all bridges, trusses, and electrical diagrams. Engineering is a whole lot more!
About the Episode:
Once upon a time, I went to school for engineering. I even worked as a manufacturing engineer after college and for a time while I was starting Farmhouse Vernacular! So, what, exactly, is an engineer? What do they do, and why does engineering matter? I’m answering that (and more!) in this episode!
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- How I chose engineering as a major, despite my other interests
- Why I was always the odd woman out when it came to the engineering crowd
- The lasting impact that thinking like an engineer has had on me, my business, and my household
And so much more!
Resources Mentioned:
Follow me on Instagram @FarmhouseVernacular!
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to the Vernacular Life Podcast, where we talk about anything and everything that goes on in our turn of the century vernacular home. I’m Paige, your host as usual, and today we’re going to talk about engineering. If you’ve been following along for a while you might know that I have a background in engineering, that’s what I went to school for, that’s what I did before I started to do this whole social media business situation.
And it seems to me that the popular impression of engineers is that nobody has any idea what they do. So today I want to talk to you about kind of what engineering is, how I got here, how I chose that, and then how that background has influenced me in what I’m doing now. So it should be really fun. I was really excited to write this episode up and let’s get chatting.
So to start off, what the heck is engineering? I’ve seen a lot of jokes go around online that nobody knows what engineers do. They’re kind of put into this weird, slightly socially awkward, somewhat of a brainiac category, kind of a know-it-all, kind of a pain, tend to take things apart. That’s kind of the engineering stereotype, right? And having been through engineering, I’m like, well, that’s, that’s not all of us, okay. We’re not all like that.
But when I was trying to come up with what engineers actually do, I was like, I don’t even know where to start. So I looked up the definition of engineering. We broke that cardinal essay writing rule of don’t start your essay with a definition. But I think that dictionary.com said that engineering is the art or science of making practical application of the knowledge of pure sciences.
And I read this, the art or science of making practical application of the knowledge of pure sciences. And I thought, yes, that. That is exactly what we do. So if you think about chemistry or physics or buildings or car engines, there are a bunch of really smart, theoretical people who have gone into making all of the principles that make those things run.
So these are the people who are on the campuses of universities who are paid by large corporations to just hang out in a lab and investigate things, hoping that they come up with something relevant. So that’s how we get equations for motion. That’s how we get equations for fluids. That’s how we get models for how different engines work. The engineers typically, aren’t the ones who do that. Those are the pure scientists.
Now I want you to think of this as kind of like a linear spectrum. So on one end, we’ve got the pure sciences, we’ve got the 100% theory, we’ve got the physics textbooks. We’ve got all of the derivations that come up with these formulas to explain these for phenomenon, which is all extremely helpful because that’s good information.
But how do we take that information and give it to a skilled person, like a welder or a mechanic, so that they can practically do something with that information? And that is where I see engineers existing. We exist to bridge the gap between the theoretical science and the physical people who actually put that science into practice. Sometimes it’s us putting it into practice. A lot of times, it’s us working with other people who are more skilled in different trades than we are, to kind of translate what’s going on at the theoretical level.
So when you think of engineering, think of applied science, that’s literally what it is. You are applying theoretical science to the physical world so that something can be produced. And because of this, we have a decent understanding of how the sciences work. We may not be able to run all of the experiments to generate all the equations, but we understand where the equations come from. We understand how they came about.
We understand the math and the experiments that went into generating those formulas and those rules. But then our job as engineers is to take that theory and figure out how to apply it in the real world in a useful way. So for example, if you have a stick of metal and you support that metal on both ends, so imagine spreading it across between two chairs or something. If you push on the middle of that metal, it’s going to change.
It might I change a little bit, might change a lot. Depends on how much force you use. The pure science would tell you what’s happening between all of the molecules in that piece of metal so that it deforms and it deflects, and it would give you a ton of information about what’s actually happening inside the material. The engineer says “Okay, I know there’s a bunch of stuff happening in there, but practically, how many pounds can I set on this piece of metal before it does something stupid?”
So we would take all of that data, all of that science of what’s going on inside that material, and we would come out and say, “Okay, that material, in that configuration, you can put 10 pounds on it and it’s going to be fine.” So that means that a consumer who doesn’t necessarily care about all of the science can say, “Okay, if I buy this and I put it like this, I can put 10 pounds on it.”
And we say, “Yep, that’s it.” So in my mind, that’s kind of what engineers do. That’s what our function is and where exactly we’re bridging the science and the real world depends on what the area is. It might be in chemistry, it might be in physics, it might be in mechanics, it might be in civil engineering and buildings.
It depends on what science we’re looking at, but the engineer’s essentially the translator from the pure sciences to the practical application. Now, how did I get into engineering? It is very interesting because growing up, I was looking for some kind of job, looking for some kind of career path. And I had a lot of different interests. I have a natural varied interest as part of my personality.
And so I was like, “Do I want to be a vet? No. Do I want to go into the arts? No, I’m not really sure.” And I was sitting in ninth grade science class, and this teacher was explaining how you can use a magnet to induce an electrical current in a coil of wire. And for the record, I hate electricity. This was the most interested in electricity I’ve ever been. It doesn’t make sense in my brain and I don’t like it, but I looked at that and I said, “What the heck is that? That’s really cool, and I want to do that.”
So I came home and I was talking to my parents about it. And my dad is actually an electrical engineer. And he said, “Well, that kind of stuff is engineering.” And I said, “Okay, okay. What is engineering?” And that was in about ninth grade, and I started to kind of research what kinds of engineering there are and what exactly it is and what kind of jobs you can get afterward.
And a large part of choosing to be an engineer was actually purely practical, because at the same time I was doing art and drawing, and I was decent at that. And I was doing acting and being involved in the musicals. And I was decent at that. And I was looking at my skillset, I guess.
And I was thinking, okay, which of these do I think I could most reliably make a living with? And out of all of them, I said “You know, I think I’m going to have the best bet of having a decent income if I choose engineering.” So I said, “Okay, we’re going to do engineering.” And as I went through school, I tried more of the sciences and I tried chemistry and I tried biology and I tried physics and hated biology. Don’t really like it.
But I did discover that I love chemistry and I love physics and I love them equally. And so I said, “Okay, if I love chemistry and I love physics, why give up either of them? Let’s just do two engineering majors, because why not?” That’s the logical conclusion for a 16 year old, is that I love both of these things, so let’s just do both of them. So I ended up settling on mechanical engineering, which focuses pretty heavily on physics and a discipline called material science engineering.
And the difference is that I say that where mechanical engineering stops caring, materials engineering starts caring. So materials engineering is really focused on what’s happening inside the material. What is happening between the atoms, between the molecules, how does treating the material with heat or time or temperature changes, how does that impact the material properties?
And then mechanical engineering just cares about what the properties of this specific thing are and how to use them to do mechanical things. So I decided to do both of these degrees, and it was very funny because I went down to tour the college that I ended up going to and I was in a polka-dot raincoat and had a bright yellow purse. And the head of the material science department kind of looked at me and said, “So you’re interested in engineering?”
And I can’t really fault him because, that’s usually the response I’ve gotten because in college I was very colorful. I was very flamboyant. I wore dresses and I wore bright colored tights and I wore crazy eye makeup. So I was a little bit of a walking carnival all the time. And so I didn’t look like what you would typically think was in engineering. And so he was just kind of looking at me like, you sure about this? And I was like, “Yep.” And that was the end of that.
So we went through college. This is actually where I met Brandon because he was the only other one going through this same two-degree program that I was. We were both taking mechanical and material science, so we had a lot of the same classes and I ended up developing a plan that would let me get through in the shortest amount of time, making sure I got all the credits and then he kind of followed that plan.
So we just went through school together, and once we got to the end, the interesting thing about engineering is it’s a really good degree if you want to do just about anything. And Brandon and I actually say this quite a lot, it’s probably the most useful degree that you can have if you want to do anything in your life, because it teaches you how to think and it teaches you how to learn. I’ll talk about more about that in a little bit.
But after college I was looking around at my options and I said, “Okay, what can we do? What are the options out there for someone coming out of engineering?” And you can go with whatever is interesting to you. So if you’re more interested in theory, you can become a research and development engineer for a company. If you are more interested in physical designing, you can become a design engineer. I was very much interested in efficiency and in production.
So I ended up in a field called manufacturing engineering or process engineering. And this is probably where you may have heard some of my talks on efficiency and making things run more smoothly. This is where that comes from, is my work as a manufacturing engineer.
So what a manufacturing engineer does is essentially, all of the research has already been done. All of the products have already been designed and they are in production now to be made and then to be sold. As you are producing these products, you have probably a pretty large team that’s producing them. Maybe you have a whole production line. Maybe you have just a segment of your production floor. Maybe it’s your entire production floor of people who are usually not engineers, who are there to help you make your product.
And what the process engineer does, or the manufacturing engineer does is they look at the production process and they say, where are we wasting time? Because in manufacturing, you hear this all the time, time is money. And I don’t mean that in a everybody has to work 100% of the time and give 300% effort because that doesn’t happen. In fact, on manufacturing floors, we only ever aim for about 85% efficiency.
If you are higher efficiency than that, your standards are probably not high enough. So in general, if you’re hitting 85% efficiency, you’re doing pretty good, and there’s a lot of various ways that you can calculate that. But the production engineer or the process engineer comes in and says, “Where are some of our biggest time sucks? Where are we wasting time?”
And some of the, some of the ways that you can think about wasting time, or just waste in general, is imagine if every time you got an order for a hundred units, you made 110 just in case, because you might make some bad ones. Well, every time you make 110 and you don’t need 110, you’ve spent a bunch of time and effort and energy and materials making that extra 10 that you don’t need. So that’s one kind of waste in a manufacturing floor.
Another one is waiting. So what if all you’re doing all day is waiting for a machine to run and that’s your whole job? Well, then somebody’s sitting there basically being bored while this machine runs its cycle. So can, can you find something else that needs to be done in the production process that they can do while the machine is running so that they’re not bored and that time isn’t spent waiting. Travel is another big one.
If you have to walk all over the production floor just to produce your one product, then that’s just a lot of wasted time, a lot of wasted steps, a lot of wasted effort. And we really don’t get too insane with this. I intentionally stayed away from automotive, which is where it’s really, really insane with waste elimination, but this was a very interesting place to be in terms of engineering, because it changes your perspective on everything in your life.
And this is where some of our talks about engineering and efficiency in the home come from, is because a lot of the principles that I would learn and implement on these production floors, I found again when I was researching historic kitchens, and that was one of the most fascinating things. So when I was researching historic kitchens for our own kitchen renovation, I was looking through a lot of old housekeeping books and a lot of old homemaking books, references for housewives and for women who were at home trying to make their house run more smoothly. And I found that a lot of the efficiency principles that were in those books were variations on some of the very same principles that I used on manufacturing floors.
And I just found that so fascinating because a lot of times with this efficiency stuff, it’s marketed as the newest and latest thing, and here it is in books from a hundred years ago that housewives were using. So I did that for about five years on a couple different jobs, different manufacturing, floors, doing different things. And I didn’t not enjoy it, shall we say, I really enjoyed the problem solving aspect of it. I really enjoyed the efficiency of it.
I really enjoyed when we could take a process that was taking eight hours and we could figure out how to get it down to one hour. I really enjoyed that challenge. But obviously, I am not in that anymore. I’m doing something else now. So what happened? Well, a couple things happened. One, I’ve said this before, but I don’t think I’m a particularly great employee. I think I have very good ideas. I think I have a lot of excitement. I think I love generating ideas, but I just work much better for myself than I do for someone else.
So after a couple companies and getting tied up in bureaucratic red tape, where they would say, “Hey, we want you to make this better,” but then when I try to make it better, they would say “Oh, we can’t do that for such and such reasons,” and a lot of times the reasons red tape. And I’m not saying this necessarily to complain, but if I’m stuck in a situation that could be improved and I can’t do it, I get very, very frustrated.
So I left partially because I just wanted more freedom. And then partially because I had this strange opportunity with social media after sharing our house for two or three years, that I had a little bit of a following. And I thought, there are people making money at this. And in the future with a family, it would be a lot better if I could be earning an income from home with a more flexible work schedule than working for someone else.
So with all of those things, we kind of ended up in a perfect storm where I did leave my job almost two years ago now, or probably not when you’re hearing this, but at the time of recording, it was almost two years ago and it’s been good. It’s been very challenging. And I’m not hear in this particular episode to talk about all of the different challenges of that.
If that’s something you’re interested in, hearing about running some kind of social media business, at least from my perspective, definitely send us an email or send me a comment on Instagram and I’ll see what I can do. But the reason that I really wanted to make this particular episode today is one, to explain what engineers do and to give you a little bit of insight into our brains. And then two, to pull out what I think the most valuable lessons are from engineering and talk to you about how to maybe get some of that in your own life.
So how does engineering help me in my job now? Because clearly what I’m doing is very, very far from engineering. It’s not even close to it anymore, but I do think that some of that training has made it a little bit easier for me to do what I do than if I hadn’t had that. And it is a little bit of a difficult question to answer. It’s kind of like asking how has your personality given you an advantage in your life?
And it’s like, I don’t really know. This has been my personality my whole life. Engineering, I think, honed a part of my personality that was already there. So naturally I’m a fairly inquisitive person. Naturally, I try to think outside the box and naturally, I like to solve problems. So engineering just gave me a very big and powerful toolbox to do those things that I like to do naturally, but better.
So one of the things about engineers is that if people are frustrated about them, a lot of times it’s because we seem to be know-it-alls. We seem to not listen to anybody. We seem to just do our own thing. We seem to ignore the rules when it seems like it’s convenient for us. And, and I can’t fault any of that, because that’s somewhat accurate. But the thing that happens in engineering, especially during the education phase and then in the working phase, is that you become a really, really good problem solver.
Most of engineering after you get past about the third semester is the same level of difficulty in different classes, in different forms. It’s more problems. It’s more challenges. It’s more difficulty. It’s more thinking outside the box and you just do it over and over and over and over and over again. Every homework assignment, every group project, every lab report, every discussion in class, it’s all complex, out of the box problem solving.
And along with that, engineering has a way of having teachers that are very good at what they do and are very knowledgeable about what they’re talking about, but don’t always convey it in the most learnable format. So a lot of times there will be concepts that just don’t stick in your brain. For whatever reason, it’s really challenging, it’s really difficult. Can’t understand why this equation works this way, I can’t understand why this formula matters, and you are left with no choice but to sit by yourself with a bunch of really dense, dry textbooks and try to force your brain to understand what’s happening.
And this is pretty much universal from what I can tell in engineering, is that when you’re doing your homework, you’re learning half the content along with doing the actual problems. And so doing that over and over for multiple classes, multiple years, it means that you gain confidence in your ability to teach yourself something that’s really hard.
And I think self-teaching, and self-learning is probably one of the single greatest skills that you can ever acquire in your life. Because if you have the ability to teach yourself something that you want to know, you are virtually unstoppable. There’s nothing you can’t do if you have decided that you want to learn how to do it. And especially in this day and age, where you have basically unlimited access to information via the internet. Everything is on the internet. You want to know how to start a podcast, look it up on the internet.
You want to know how to YouTube channel, you want to know how to start an Etsy shop or get a certification online, it is so easy to find that information. But learning things and teaching yourself things is a skill that you have to train. It’s a skill that you have to hone. And I think for non-engineers, if you wanted to level up in one area, in an area that would put you far above other people, in terms of your goals, figure out how to teach yourself things.
And engineers aren’t necessarily smarter than other people. They’re not necessarily better than other people, but I think we just have a really high degree in our ability to figure out complex stuff on the fly, because we’ve just had so much practice doing it. So as kind of a funny little anecdote or an aside, the reason that Brandon and I actually met was because I failed a thermodynamics test.
And thermodynamics for whatever is an incredibly challenging subject for me. I can do a lot of things. I can do a lot of things in engineering. I was sitting in Thermodynamics II, and I was just like, this is it. This is the limit of my intellectual capability. This is going to be a challenge. And I took this first test and I bombed it, like really badly bombed it. I think I was under a 50.
We were not in a good situation. And Brandon being the genius that he is, of course did very well on the test. And I looked around and I said, “Okay, I need help. I need to figure this out because clearly, this is not something I’m capable of teaching myself.” And so I asked him to study with me and he did study with me. And then two years later we ended up dating, but that’s a separate story. But the point is that there was nothing that this teacher could say, there was no way that he could present this information such that I would understand it effortlessly. And he was one of the best teachers. He was a very, very good teacher.
And so that was kind of the first time that I was confronted with this, this is really challenging. You’re going to have to work your butt off to do better at it. And you’re going to have to teach yourself most of this because clearly, you don’t get it the way that most of other people do. And the skills from that have served me in not only in the rest of my engineering, but in the rest of my life.
It’s that I’m not scared to try to learn something anymore because I have tried and successfully learned so many other things in other aspects of my life. So if you were to take something away from engineering as a non-engineer, it’s to train and work that muscle that learns things, train that muscle that has the interest to go find a piece of information and then apply it. And if you do that over and over and over, I think you will see results.
I have to believe you will see results, because you will just have done it so many times, you will gain confidence in your ability to learn things. And I think this is also a little bit of where engineers get the stereotype of being know-it-alls, and only really listening to what we think, is because once you’ve done so many of these problems, once you’ve seen so much of behind the curtain of how things work, of how the rules were written, of where these equations came from and why the rules are what they are, you start to learn what you can and can’t do.
You start to learn what rules you can bend and what rules you can’t bend. And I think the same applies when you have tried a wide variety of things. When you have attempted a bunch of different hobbies, when you have tried to teach yourself different things off the internet, when you have tried and failed at different things, I think you just gain a little bit more experience in the world.
And of course, yes, you know what you don’t know. You know how much more there is to learn, but you also know that baking isn’t quite as hard as it seemed. You know, it’s like, that looks difficult, but I’ve baked 50 loaves of bread. So I’m pretty sure I can figure that out. The bottom line is that I think engineering gives people confidence in their ability to solve problems. And I think even though in engineering, that is a very targeted experience toward the sciences and toward STEM-related fields, I think that is a very valuable skill and trait to acquire for anyone.
So even if you aren’t an engineer, you have no plans to be an engineer. I think it’s a good life direction to become someone who is not afraid of problems, to become someone who is interested in learning things and teaching themselves things and being willing to try and fail at things just to see what happens.
So the last thing I’ll leave off is if you know anyone in your life who is thinking about going into engineering, or you know anyone who’s in engineering or who’s talking about it, or maybe you yourself are thinking about engineering, there’s a couple things that I would say, is that one, it’s a very good way to not be poor.
It is a pretty good, somewhat guaranteed income coming out of college. As a pure engineer you’re probably never going to be a billionaire, but you will have a stable income, pretty reliably, because almost everything in the world needs an engineer behind it. But if you make it through the program, I think it will set you up to do pretty much anything you want. Before I recorded this, I looked up the degrees of some of the big CEOs and I found, I don’t know, about 30% or 40% of the ones on this list all had some kind of engineering degree.
So even though they were running Apple or Walmart or whatever it was, they had this foundation in engineering, which I really think teaches you how to think. And knowing how to think and knowing how to learn is significantly more valuable than any degree. So this was a little bit of a different episode, a different kind of podcast, talking about engineering, but it’s something that I obviously care quite a lot about because I went through it and I got the degrees.
And I think there are some takeaways even for non-engineers in what engineering teaches you. So I hope you learned something. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for hanging out with me and I will see you next time. Bye.