• Question: are you interested in engineering? If you are do you have any tips on how to get started.

    Asked by to Kieren, Rowena, Roy on 19 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Rowena Fletcher-Wood

      Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      I’ve just been at the Big Bang Fair representing (amongst other things) the “tomorrow’s engineers” stall, encouraging people into engineering. Engineering is really an applied science, so as a practical scientist I am very interested in it.

      The biggest thing I would say I notice about engineers is their interest in creating things and trying things. You can try learning engineering from text books, but that would be very hard going. The best tip I can give you is to make things and investigate things. Come up with schemes on how to make a device at home that will help you, even something as simple as a timed cat-food dispenser or a cart you can fix onto your bicycle. These kinds of projects will help you to think like an engineer and, most importantly, will allow you to engineer now and enjoy it now!

    • Photo: Kieren Bradley

      Kieren Bradley answered on 20 Mar 2014:

      I like engineering, and could easily have been tempted to do a degree in engineering had I been given an inspiring talk just before choosing my options. As it was I didn’t choose to do engineering, but one of my supervisors is an engineer, so I guess I am a tiny bit of an engineer even if I don’t spend much time in the engineering building. Rowena definitely has good advice about just making things and maybe I’d add taking things apart. I find that looking to see how something else is made can be more effective than building your own thing from scratch, it will certainly give you ideas.

      If you decide that you want to go to university to become an engineer you will need to make sure you pay attention in your maths and science classes and choose to do some sort of design course (maybe electronics, graphics or materials design) when you do your GCSEs. You’re probably already quite good with computers, but learning how to programme computers is something a lot of my friends in engineering have to do for their degrees, so maybe you could take it up as a hobby. A programming language like Scratch might be a fun way to start.

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