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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Originally, decades and even centuries ago, engineers were specialists in the transformation and usage of materials. If you stop to think about, from buildings or fortification constructions, to chemical or naval engineering, mechanical, electrical, etc, what all branches of engineering do is to study, define and/or monitor the tasks of getting and transforming materials into forms considered better for civilization. Minerals, wood and chemicals are transformed into ships, bridges, appliances, metal bars and plates, or more refined chemical products like gasoline and medicines. Some more modern forms of engineering like forest or biochemical engineering also do that, advancing into the area of organic materials. All these kinds of engineering required good knowledge and interest in physics, chemistry and mathematics to model and understand the natural processes Observe that in most languages with cognate words for engineer (Spanish, Portuguese, maybe Italian and French too) these words are not associated with “engines”, but with “ingenious”. I don’t know the English word origin, may be it was the same and was somewhat changed.
This changed recently with “software engineer”. It seems to be associated now with the use of mathematical and logical skills, a must-be in the previous activities, too.
Sorry for English errors, it’s not my native language, as you may have guessed.
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