Prompt 1

Cameron B.
     
      One preconception that I listed was that engineers use a large amount of math on a daily basis. I consulted my Engineering 101 textbook to read the descriptions of each engineering degree offered here at MSU. Most of the descriptions did not use the word math in them, which was very shocking to me. With all of the required math courses engineers are required to take, I thought almost every description would involve the word math. Do engineers really use all of the math they are required to learn? No, but they will use some of the fundamentals they learn in these math courses. Trigonometry is a big one for Civil engineering, and I like trigonometry well enough that I feel I work well with it.
Another preconception that I listed was that engineers are nerdy and anti-social. The textbook really helped me understand why this is completely inaccurate for engineers. In the class that I took that required this textbook, we were told that being an engineer involved being vocal in groups and working together as a team, which the textbook described as one of the basic concepts all engineers must know and do well. If you cant communicate your ideas to your boss in a job or your co-workers, then you are not a very good engineer. When visiting with engineers who worked with my dad, all of them communicated to each other well and got the tasks provide to them done as a team, which really opened my eyes as to how engineers really work. I used to think engineers were just very smart people who got what they needed done by themselves, but the textbook and my own experiences showed me different.
      The last preconception I came up with was that engineers wear hard-hats and look and design construction plans. This is true for a small portion of construction engineers, but there are so many more fields of engineering. The textbook listed 9 different engineering programs, and construction engineering was not one of them. With a wide variety of engineers, I don't know how this became a preconception but it has become one. If I were to state a specific form of engineering, then the answer would probably be different. So why do people think of engineers as men who wear hard-hats and look at construction plans? I don't know that answer, and the book didn't give a specific answer either.
      Overall, the book was a helpful resource to finding out the truth behind these preconceptions. It answered some specific questions that I had, yet left some unanswered. We don't always need to know the answers to everything, and the book did a good job of leaving some questions unanswered.