2012-09-25 - Engineering

I never really had any other choice but to become an Engineer. It was the only thing that felt right to me. The University of Alberta was the only school, and Engineering was the only program I applied for. Sure I had other ideas as a kid (for a while I wanted to be an architect) but once the idea of engineering came into my head it was all I wanted to be. I got the idea to become an engineer from my uncles, two of which are professional engineers, while others work in highly technical jobs. One of the things that interested me most about Engineering was the design aspect of it. I’ve been trying to design things most of my life and a profession that was built around it just made sense.

I enjoy designing things, I enjoy thinking about designing things, and I enjoy thinking about the design of things. When I was a kid one of my dreams was to be a writer. The problem was that I never actually got around to writing the books I wanted to write because I never finished designing stuff for them. I had a plan to write a sci-fi saga but that required designing ships and weapons and figuring out how everything worked. Then I had to map out the section of space where it was all going on, think up planets, systems, and the races that inhabited them. It turned out that I was more interested in creating a universe then writing about what happens to it. I also remember having a set of small toy space ships as a kid. They were just generic ships but I enjoyed playing with them because I could make things up about them. They all had little bits and marks on them that I could pretend were various things. It was all about looking at them and thinking about what each ship needed and what each part could possibly be. I did the same thing with Lego and K’Nex. I’d build something with an overall shape and look in mind but I’d also be thinking about the parts, imagining where things were and what each piece did. When I was finished I’d have something that was fully functional in my head. Whenever I’d build something it was important to me that it made sense that, in some way, it seemed real.

Once I had decided on engineering and finished my first year it came time to choose a discipline. I choose computers because it was the only one that really seemed to make sense. The reason is simple; I really like computers. My earliest memories were of computers. I remember playing rampage on an old black and green computer. I remember playing cross-country Canada on the Macs at school. I remember being fascinated by the mirror tool in the paint program that came with our printer. I do not own a computer that I haven’t taken apart at some point in time. I built the computer I primarily use from parts I bought online. I had to rebuild one of my older computers because it acquired a motherboard problem. I find computers fascinating. There are so many languages, technologies and systems to discover. Every day there’s a new version of some software coming out or a new technology being developed. You program a computer with lines of code and its hardware sets about doing what that code says to do. That intersection is very much where I see myself and my education. I’m not a programmer although I enjoy programming but I’m also not a technician- although I enjoy working with hardware, I am a computer engineer because I want to deal with all of it. Every time I learn something new about computers it just makes me want to learn more, and I really enjoy learning new things. I consider it one of my life goals to learn as much as I can. That’s why engineering and computers appeal to me so much.

One final thing; I recently modified the writings section so that it has categories. I’m in the progress of making a programs category, writing about various programs I’ve made (as well as this website) to describe how they work. This is similar to the Programs category in the picture page but more in-depth and focusing on things I’ve written from scratch where as a lot of the pictures are of example programs I’ve made from the couple of textbooks I’ve been going through.