How can I help people as an engineer?

Helping people is the reason I became an engineer! I’m an acoustical engineer. Some of the things I’ve worked on:

• Microphones so people with hearing aids can hear a phone conversation even in a noisy room
• Wall & ceiling design so you don’t hear your neighbors
• Making offices & classrooms quiet so that people can hear the teacher and aren’t distracted
• Making lawnmowers and leaf blowers quieter

Other types of engineers also help people. Civil engineers work to make sure we have safe water, roads, and bridges. Mechanical engineers make sure that we’re comfortable and safe in buildings, improve the safety and efficiency of cars, figure out how to reduce the use of pesticides and herbicides on farms. The list goes on and on – engineers are always trying to make things better.

And remember that you can always change if it isn’t right for you. My husband started out in acoustics, but has worked in sonar, radar, weed imaging, and now pacemaker design! Learning is never wasted.

Find an area that you are interested in – there are many applications to healthcare and climate change, for example.

There are so many ways to help people as an engineer. You can go into areas in which the end users is a person that may need assistance, think devices such as prosthetics or hearing aids or other medical devices, the list goes on. You can work in areas that impact the general population. Think about Covid stay-at-home and how well the computers, wireless devices, internet worked! That infrastructure had never been tested for that kind of demand, and it worked fabulously. Had areas of the country been failing, it would have been a totally different experience for everyone. You can think about the military and designing equipment to help them in their mission. There is engineering in so much of our everyday life.

You can also volunteer to work with youth in STEM, and get or keep them interested in that profession. Don’t limit helping people to just be in your job, you can volunteer with organizations that you are passionate about outside of your job. Typically companies will have community outreach volunteer activities that are fun and rewarding to participate in. If you do web design, you can volunteer to do the web pages for nonprofits or other such groups. As an engineer there are so many ways to give back. It will be a natural for you!

Engineering is a profession that will open doors to many opportunities to help people both directly and indirectly.  Like any degree program you learn three things:  1) background information specific to your major, but also 2) how to find and organize information and 3) problem solving.  All of those skills can be used to help people.  Two examples for me personally are volunteering for Habitat for Humanity (sometimes as the only female) and serving on a board at our local library as the only one who could read and understand construction drawings.  

Engineering helps people in so many ways! Sometimes, it helps people directly like with life-saving medical devices and other times it is indirectly like with safe, and reliable transportation (cars, planes, trains, etc.). In my day-to-day work as an engineer, I also help people at my workplace solve complex problems. In the end, the products I help design contribute to making people’s lives easier, more efficient, safer, and potentially even longer! Every field of engineering improves people’s lives.

I am an aerospace engineer and so I know that I help people by working on products that enable safe flight. I help to keep the world connected, whether it is for a vacation or to transport life-saving supplies. I don’t directly interface with each person that my work may have touched, but I am ok with that. I know that I have done work that has made a substantial difference and probably impacted more people’s lives than I will ever meet over the course of my entire life. For me, that is one of the coolest and most rewarding parts about being an engineer – it is the vast number of people’s lives that you can impact with a single, well-designed, and thoroughly tested product.

Engineering is a very broad field and there are countless ways to help people as an engineer! In some engineering jobs you can help people very directly, for example as a biomedical engineer developing prosthetics or other medical devices where you might even be in contact with the individual lives you improved/saved. In other jobs you would still help people but on a higher population level for example developing clean technologies to battle climate change or designing wastewater treatment systems. You can see if your university has programs like Engineers Without Borders where you can get involved early in your career.

Engineering absolutely does help people, both indirectly and directly. Indirectly, think of the products that you’d be making and the problems it would solve. One of the major concepts of engineering is finding new and creative ways to find solutions to problems to help people. Safer or more efficient travel, technology aids for people with disabilities, prosthetics, environmentally safer products.

But you can also be in an engineering role and directly help people. For example, in more of a customer-facing role like a program chief engineer or supplier quality engineer, where you would work directly with customers or suppliers helping with field issues or concerns. Imagine an airplane on the ground that has a malfunction, maybe you could be the one to help the aircraft mechanics through a repair and get it up and running again. I think with engineering, the possibilities are endless!

As an engineer, you can help entire communities of people, even if you don’t always meet the individual people who your work helps.

As a civil engineer, you can improve the quality of drinking water for a community, or design a wastewater (sewage) treatment plant that will help keep the local rivers cleaner, or design a traffic intersection that lets people in wheelchairs cross a street more safely and also helps make people’s daily commute easier.

As a biomechanical engineer, you can design a better heart pump so that people who need heart replacements can live a better quality of life for longer.

Every type of engineering is about solving problems, so thinking about the problems that people need to have solved would help you learn about what types of engineering might be right for you.

Choosing a career in STEM is one of the best ways to help people today. Not only do you get to work on innovative new solutions to today's problems, but you get to choose tomorrow's problems to solve and the technology necessary to solve them.

Whether it's a biomedical engineer creating a new medical device or prosthetic, a software developer creating a new app for a company or organization that provides services in the community, a civil engineer designing efficient and sustainable new housing and transportation, or an aerospace engineering helping people and products travel across the globe to where they're needed, engineers make the world a better place with their work. Then, when you're not working, the pay you earn for your transformational work will help your family and your community, and you can devote your time and funds to organizations you care about.

This is such a great question! Engineering is working in the background in so many areas and is absolutely helping people!

For instance, engineers who work on farming equipment are literally helping farmers to feed, clothe, and house the world’s population. While doing this they are creating more sustainable solutions that help save the earth and make farmers more profitable.

Biomedical engineers design prosthetics that make day to day living much more comfortable and allows people to do things they never could without their prosthetics. They also design medical equipment that literally saves people’s lives!

Engineers design cars that are fast, fun, comfortable, and more fuel efficient. Engineers design packaging that is stronger and recyclable. I could really go on and on… but I hope this gives you an idea of how much engineering helps people.

From my experience, engineering is the perfect place to be when it comes to helping people. Engineers and their designs show up in many places in our everyday lives. They design the water systems for our homes, the appliances and furnaces that make our lives comfortable. In addition, they design roads we drive on, the cars we drive in, the airplanes we fly in to visit family and vacation. Also, they create the medical equipment used to check our health and help heal us if that is necessary. Not only these examples, but they design the computer chip and other components for our phones, laptops, etc. along with materials used to make all the things we use each and every day.

Our lives as we know it would not be possible without the help of engineering. I spent many years designing airplanes and always felt our designs brought people closer together and allowed us to see parts of the world we could only dream of before airplanes existed. The basics of engineering is solving problems in order to help others.

As an engineer I develop a Process Control System which is used for Batch Manufacturing by Life Science customers like Pharmaceuticals. The work I do allows these pharmaceutical customers to bring new drugs to market faster. These can be life saving time critical drugs like we saw needed during the pandemic to produce vaccines.

We can also make the manufacturing more efficient which means even common drugs like aspirin, can be manufactured in greater quantities at lower cost to the consumer, making them more accessible to people who need them. The development of these systems requires many kinds of engineers, Software Engineers like myself, Computer, Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and our end product is used by Process Engineers and Chemical Engineers.

The fact that we are engineers and we are able to motivate you to be one in itself is very fulfilling and a way to give back to society at large. Other than that, you can volunteer training sessions on any science topic of your interest. Once an engineer, a particular level of scientific aptitude and understanding is automatically achieved backed by technical education, college projects, and live projects. This qualification opens doors for you at many NGOs where you can give back to society in various ways. You can teach science, maths, computers, engineering subjects as well. I work actively with such NGOs.

You don't have to be an engineer to help someone.  In fact, if you like to help people, you are performing a wonderful deed as a kind human being and G-d will bless you for that. An engineer is just a man-made superficial profession with its rules and requirements that compartmentalize an engineer to be one who's skilled in STEM.  Well, that may have been the status quo, but as you see today, engineers are first-of-all people and kind people want to help others, be it people or animals or the environment.  Engineering has become so interdisciplinary today that you will find engineering in any discipline, not limited to a a technical one.  Take for example, the computer. The computer has become a household appliance.  Or the Internet. Or the cellphone.  Everyone can become an engineer if they like solving problems and helping people and not destroying the world by misapplying technology.