A lot of my friends are majoring in electrical, industrial, or mechanical engineering, but I honestly have no idea what a professional engineer actually does.
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Engineers apply science to do useful things. When you start nit picking the line between science and engineering can become blurry, but generally scientists seek to increase knowledge for the sake of knowledge whereas engineers take knowledge and use it to do things. For most branches of the hard sciences, there is a corresponding branch of engineering. Electrical engineers understand electromagnetics to design power systems, motors, computers, etc. mechanical engineers understand materials science, classical physics, fluids, etc to design pretty much everything. A very clean example of the line is a chemist versus a chemical engineer. (Very generally) A chemist works in a small lab trying to figure out how to synthesize some new molecule or how to do it better; a chemical engineer designs a system to take that process and scale it up to industrial production quantities.
The jobs of engineers vary greatly too. Engineers oversee the entire process of a product’s lifecycle from conceptual design to disposal. Some engineers design the thing, some oversee manufacturing, some oversee operation of complex machinery/systems, some do research and development. Pretty much everything man made thing you have ever seen or touched was designed by an engineer and manufactured under the supervision of an engineer.
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