Do the high stakes of engineering scare you?

Actually, one of the best parts of an engineering career is the ability to fundamentally improve peoples' lives through innovations and sound design. In any engineering role, there are clearly defined standards that have been developed over time that will guide you to make the right decisions. Any innovation will require deep testing, both virtual and actual, to assure that it will be safe. However, you can never be anything but thorough and thoughtful in everything you do. Further, you will have great support to guide you during your young career years to be sure that serious errors are caught. I would urge you not to let this fear dissuade you from an excellent career!

Very rarely do we design something by ourselves. When designing a product or a process, there will be an entire team involved. The team will look at the engineering design from different aspects such as ergonomics and safety. Marketing will do market research and focus groups to see if the product meets a need, how it will be used, and what can be done to make it better.

We can use our engineering degrees to design to the best of our ability but we cannot take responsibility for what people do after the products are in their hands. There are cases where things are used in a different way than how they were designed. Here is a really weird example: I have twin boys and I never bought them guns of any kind. They still managed to create guns out of legos and even out of a piece of toast! There was no way I could have imagined they would use those things in that way. And yes, we still have legos and we still have toast.

One of the great things about engineering is you are never working alone. There are multiple people/ teams involved in a design or process. This provides multiple eyes on a project to ensure everything is going smoothly and will not cause any negative impacts.

My company engineers and operates a large network that impacts a large number of people. We teach our employees to Prepare, Pause and Confirm every time working on our network. Prepare - make sure you have all the documents, procedures and equipment in order to complete a job, pause before you perform a task and make sure everything looks correct and confirm after you have performed a task that there were no service impacts. While there are still mistakes that happen this mindset makes sure our team has the best interest of our customers in mind while we are working.

The team performs root cause analysis anytime there is an outage to understand what happened and how to put procedures and protocols in place to prevent a similar outage in the future. We also educate our employees on mistakes that have occurred so they can not make the same mistake in the future. The culture around the root cause analysis focuses on education and prevention not penalizing the person who made the mistake. We want to ensure if a future outage occurs the people involved feel comfortable speaking up so we can restore the outage quickly.

The network is also built with redundancy in case a component fails it will not cause an outage. Every step along the way from the design of the network to the implementation and maintenance has the customer in mind. However, we are humans and make mistakes so the teams are trained to respond quickly if there is an outage and restore service as quickly as possible.

I think it is fantastic that you are thinking about and understanding the impact that engineering has on people! Engineering firms who work on products that could impose risk to human lives (and there are many) take this very seriously.

In design, you design for fail safe systems, so even if there is a failure, the system remains safe. There are entire committees formed around safety that review designs, review events that happen during testing and once in production.

I think instead of thinking of it as scary, I think of it as a big responsibility. It is important to understand the risks and mitigate them. This is a great question and actually makes me think you'd be a great engineer because you are thinking broadly about the impacts of engineering.

Keeping it in perspective is important. We all have social responsibility when it comes to what we do. Everything we do, every day in STEM or personally, has an impact on our society. We have to be mindful of our actions at all times and recognize the potential impacts. Having good intentions but also recognizing that others may not will guide you in your journey. Regardless, if you aren’t the one discovering or inventing something, someone else will.

Engineering has always been pushing the edge of innovation and creativity. In most cases your designs are reviewed, if you are unsure work with your co-workers/engineers to review your designs. Getting input from a more senior engineer keeps you learning and innovating.