Why is being an engineer important?

That is a really good question.  
I would say, Engineers make practical use of the things that are around us.  Dam creates electric power, levers gives us strength, etc.  Then new technologies created gives us comfort and exploration; airplane, satellite, telephone, etc.  
What is also really great and important about Engineering is that it gives opportunity to continue to innovate and explore new possibilities.  This gives us opportunity to discover, learn, and evolve.  Thus, never mundane, boring, and repetitive.  What a great environment to spend your career.  

Being an engineer is important because you can make peoples' lives better.  You can invent technologies that make travel safer and more green. You can create better medical treatments that save lives and make people more comfortable.  You can make chocolate, buildings, spaceships, entertainment (what did people do before smarphones were everywhere) and anything you can think of.  

It makes me feel good to be an engineer because I'm constantly learning something new every day.  When I encounter problems at work, we buckle down and figure out a way to solve them. 

Yes, doing my job definitely makes me feel good! Being an engineer is important. Since you’re explaining to your mom, I’ll give you reasons that I think would matter to a parent:

1. You can earn good money and engineers are almost always in demand.
2. Engineers literally build bridges, improve manufacturing processes (for oil and gas, for airplanes, for making soda cans or burgers), design cameras or how cell phones will communicate, make insulin pumps for diabetics, develop machines that can test for COVID or analyze your blood, and build safe airplanes/cars/bicycles. Almost everything we use on a daily basis was made by an engineer.
3. Engineering gives you skills you can apply anywhere. If you’re an engineer, you can also work for the city government, go into business, or be a consultant in a legal company. It gives you options if you want to switch careers.
4. Women engineers are growing by the day. I had a positive experience joining my high school robotics club and studying biomedical engineering in college. My peers and professors at USC were nice and respectful. The classes can be difficult but with help from teachers, older students, online resources, and clubs on campus, you will succeed! Even if some peers aren’t nice to you, you can find a club for women engineers or women in science and make friends easily.

Being an engineer is important because an engineer is someone who solves problems and is continuously learning and helping society.

There are countless problems facing society on all fronts. These problems span many fields and industries. Engineers tackle environmental issues, building and transportation management needs, internet service delivery needs, software engineering puzzles, and many more areas where problem solving and creativity are required.

Engineers are taught the skill of learning how to learn. Technology is always evolving. The world is always evolving. An engineer learns from others, learns from the past and builds on that to make progress, help communities, and advance civilization.

Girls and women constitute about 50% of the population and have tremendous brainpower. Society needs to harness the brainpower of that under-utilized segment of the population in order to have more creative solutions and faster well rounded technological advances.

Solving problems and making advancements that help people and help society is a rewarding career and a fulfilling calling.

Being an engineer is important in today's world due to the vast and rapid industrialization that we see on Earth. Engineer's support many "life functions.” As the world population increases, these humans need to be transported, fed, nursed back to health using less invasive and effective technologies, entertained, etc. My previous and current job lie within the transportation industry. There is nothing more rewarding than seeing people in your community benefiting off of something you have designed or engineered. Seeing the effects that the components I've designed have on my local community makes me feel humbled and honored to serve them.

Engineering is a critical profession. During the COVID-19 pandemic, my entire work site was deemed as essential, so we all have continued working throughout all the stay at home orders. Initially, as people were praising the health care workers, truck drivers, grocery store clerks, and other jobs that kept going, I always threw in engineering. Think about how we are communicating with emails and the internet – through cell phones, with video, with group video chats/meetings, over a wireless internet connection, all using electricity. So think about all the engineering and technology that had to go into making this possible. I think engineering has been one of the unsung hero professions during the pandemic. Imagine if we lost electricity for a period of time – how different would your family’s life be? I was skeptical if the wireless infrastructure would be able to handle EVERYONE working from home, schooling from home, streaming entertainment video, group chats and gaming. I was thrilled when there was not a hiccup that occurred when so much of the country, and world, starting using so much bandwidth. It is engineers that made this possible. All engineers should be proud.

Additionally, think about when the pandemic will be over – people will be flying to visit family, for vacations, for work – those beautiful planes are a result of fabulous engineering. Think of the rides and shows at Disneyland – a lot of engineering goes into making that fun! Look at the military and the gear they use and carry for their jobs to keep the US safe – more engineering. How about the instruments in the hospitals to keep people healthy and save lives – more amazing engineering. Engineering is all around us, and we need more engineers in the future to both support what we have come to depend on in our current world and also to keep creating the new world we don’t even know of yet.

Hi! In order to provide an answer to why being an engineer is important, I thought I’d share what I do and why it is important as one example. I work as a materials research engineer for NASA Glenn Research Center. As a NASA materials engineer, I study the performance and durability of spacecraft materials in the space environment. To do this, I fly experiments on the exterior of the International Space Station, exposing a wide variety of material samples to the space environment for 6 months, or longer. After the samples have been exposed to space, the samples are brought back to Earth and I analyze them in a lab to see how they have changed. Then I write papers about my flight experiments and provide details on the space environmental durability of different spacecraft materials. So why is this important? Spacecraft designers use my flight data to help them select the best materials for their spacecraft to ensure they will be durable and survive in space! This can include Earth observing satellites (i.e., weather satellites), communication satellites (i.e., cell phones), and cool spacecraft such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. It makes me feel very proud that my flight data is used to design durable spacecraft!

Engineers aim to make the world a better place by solving various problems, from developing better places for people to shelter and live, to safer transportation, to better medicine, to a healthier environment, to new types of renewable energy, to better medical devices, to software for everything in the world around us, and so much more. It is also really important for girls/women to pursue engineering, because we need female perspectives on how to solve problems; engineers need to represent the world they are trying to improve, which means they need to come from all genders, all ethnicities, all socioeconomic backgrounds.

Engineers are the people who apply science to solve the world’s problems. Every product that you use during your daily activities is enhanced and designed by engineers. It is engineers who design automobiles that have built-in safety features to help keep drivers from having accidents to protecting people through crumple zones when accidents do happen. Engineers write code that route telephone calls or support video chats that we are using to stay connected during this time of isolation. Engineers help keep energy grids and water supplies safe.

Engineering is an important field of study because innovation products and technology excellence helps make the USA’s products more compelling than other companies which keeps our economy going. It also provides the tools and capabilities for our US military to protect our nation’s interests to include cybersecurity protections.

Being an engineer and seeing ideas become reality in products that serve humanity is a very rewarding career. And we need the unique perspectives of women in the professional to ensure we have more holistic solutions.

Wow! I look around, and everything has the fingerprints of an engineer. I see computer engineered devices on top of my structurally engineered desk fabricated in an industrially engineered manufacturing facility, all contained within an earthquake- and wind-engineered building, kept clean and warm by architecturally engineered HVAC systems. When I open the faucet to drink water several times a day, I realize the benefits of environmental engineers treating lake water through special filters designed in concert with chemical engineers, moved through a system of mechanically engineered valves and pumps, specified by structural and fluids engineers. My health care providers’ equipment and tools come from biomedical and chemical engineers, in concert with mechanical, aerospace, and other engineers. The solar power and other feedstocks that animate these devices, buildings, and machines are every year improved by the hard work of energy engineers. The sidewalk and roadway, our vehicles and buildings, the refrigerator I visit and the cup I hold all are so much more thoughtfully designed and delivered, and maintained, thanks to engineering skills honed over hundreds of years. Engineers have tremendous talents, along with wonderful respect for the truth and hard work. They tend to be cut from a special cloth, and I suspect we all would hate to live in a world without engineers. If you pick your workplaces and positions thoughtfully, you will be very proud of the work you do. If you study engineering in college, you will attain various skill sets that make you a much more valued member of our communities, able to help others in myriad ways. Good luck to you!

Everything you use on a daily basis – from a mechanical pencil to your cellphone to the shampoo you use to the roads you drive on – required an engineer to design and/or make. So if you enjoy using those things, it’s absolutely an important job! Knowing that the parts I design are used every day is incredibly rewarding. Being able to see my designs used in daily life makes all the hard work 100% worth it.

That is a great question. One way to think of engineering is as applied science. The scientist theorizes about or investigates or designs something new. The engineer brings it to fruition in many cases, actually building or implementing the "thing."

I am a research scientist and love coming up with new ways of doing things, but I also love building things and validating that my theoretical insights actually work in practice and at what we call scale (not just in a few instances in a laboratory, but in the real world under many different circumstances) and much of the work I do involves what is generally considered engineering activities.

While I have a PhD in Computer Science, much of what I do falls into the category of Software Engineering. I feel that without this engineering step, few of my theoretical advances could have been put into widespread use.

I LOVE my job truly, and while I am not a young woman and could easily retire, I hope never to retire because I believe that I make important contributions and thinking and working with younger people keeps my mind active and young.

We tend to think about big, important breakthroughs as being accomplished by scientists, and it is true that many of the concepts that make our world go are the result of scientific research. But engineers also create important breakthroughs, often in finally figuring out how to put new concepts or technologies into use, or service. People in general don't always understand the distinction between scientists and engineers. To me, it's typically the scientist's job to determine what's possible. It's often then up to engineers to make the possible, ACTUAL.

Being an engineer is an extremely important job for society. Engineers build and create life changing and life saving technology every day. In my industry, medical devices, engineers work on products that impact our patients in a profound way, sometimes even saving their lives! Having a direct impact on patients' lives makes engineering an extremely rewarding career. We listen to our surgeon, nurse, and EMT customers and try to design devices to make their jobs easier and ultimately makes our patients' lives better. In my opinion, it's very easy in this industry to feel good about what you do and be motivated to get up every morning and strive to make healthcare better each day.

Engineering is an important job because it’s a role that very few other professions have the skills to perform in most cases. We make sure that all the goods, equipment, and systems that are used in the world are not only manufactured reliably and safely, but can be used safely by consumers as well. Industrial designers can design a cool looking blender, but engineers are the ones who write all the specifications, select the final materials & part geometry, and test it to failure to make sure that it’s safe to use and eventually stops working in a way that is still safe. These roles are even more critical in cases like mass transportation, dams, and medical equipment or prosthetics, where scientists can technically figure out how to make certain parts of those function, but engineers turn that same knowledge into very precisely-designed end products and can also investigate when something unexpectedly fails in service too. There is satisfaction in working to make life more comfortable, safer, and/or more enjoyable for people.

What a great question! Civil engineer here. If you want to drink clean water, if you want sewage to be treated before it is dumped in a river, if you want safe roads and bridges, if you want to have buildings that don't fall down in earthquakes, if you want cars that are safe to drive and less polluting, thank an engineer.

Being an engineer is important because engineers create solutions to problems that affect millions of people across the world. As an aerospace engineer, I help design products which US service members use to perform their missions. It is these products which assist and protect service members who are fighting to keep us safe and defend our freedom. As an aerospace engineer, I also work on technologies like GPS, sensors, and communication systems which ensure people are safe and connected when traveling to see their friends and family. For these reasons, being an engineer is meaningful because you help shape the future and make a difference in people's lives by enabling solutions to real world problems.

Engineers design and oversee the construction of projects that shape communities and affect public health and safety. For example, I have worked on a lot of wastewater treatment plants as an environmental engineer. The work I've done on these types of projects has helped ensure that the water we flush down our toilets and the water that drains down our sinks gets cleaned before it goes back into our oceans, lakes, rivers and streams. This is good for the environment and for public health and safety. It's also good because it keeps our waterways clean and lets us keep using them for swimming, fishing, boating and other activities.

Buildings we live, work, and shop in contribute roughly 40% of our energy use, 70% of our electricity, and emit over 1/3 of the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions according to the Alliance to Save Energy. As an engineer in this market segment, we have the opportunity to help decrease energy usage by the work we do daily. This can look like many things: helping to develop energy codes, learning about new technology that we can apply to our projects, or making suggestions to our clients that can make a huge impact on energy usage.

We also are helping to create safe spaces for people to live and work in. We get to see the results of the effort daily as we drive through the city once they’ve been built!

I find both of these aspects to be very rewarding!

There is not a day that goes by that I am not proud to say that I am an Engineer. When I tell people around me that I am an engineer, I typically get a double take and a definite look of respect. They want to hear all about what I do for a living and why I choose my career. They take the time to hear all about it and think it is really cool. They always mention that I must be very smart and very good at math. Yes, we are very smart and we should be proud of that! We have to work very hard in school to get our degree. I spent many nights inside studying while my friends were out and wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Yes, my job makes me feel very good about myself, and there is not a day that goes by that I don’t make an impact on others around me with my skill set. I chose Industrial Engineering, so my job entails designing new buildings and workspaces for my clients. I ensure the areas run more efficient and safer, while keeping in mind cost as well. I have to keep abreast of current technology, which is important to stay relevant.