My Field of Study

My major for college is engineering. Engineering is the art of applying mathematics and scientific principles to problems and ideas in order to fix, improve, or invent various things and processes. As someone who has always been good at math, science, and solving problems, engineering was an easy choice for my major.

Engineering students are taught the following skills to prepare them to become professional engineers:

•  Mathematical concepts related to their specific field of study that allow them to mathematical model situations they will encounter.
• Scientific concepts related to their specific discipline of engineering that allow them to understand the constraints of the situations they will deal with
• Problem solving skills
• Team work and design processes to prepare them for working on large design projects in the workforce

 Because of their high level of technical abilities and problem solving skills, engineers are able to find work in almost any field they want to. All companies that build things, or work in technical fields, need engineers of various types in order to function. Even the FBI looks to employ engineers for various roles, including special agents and intelligence analysts.


I decided to pursue engineering because I have always enjoyed solving problems. Studying engineering gave me the opportunity to solve  problems on a daily basis during school and for my entire professional career. I was also drawn to engineering because of its deep involvement with math. I have always enjoyed doing math problems, probably because they are problems in need of solving, and have enjoyed using the knowledge I have to discover new properties that I had never seen before. I was also pushed towards engineering by the high earning potential of engineering jobs; I thought that earning very good money for doing something I enjoy seemed like a good deal.

Some of the most exciting and important companies in engineering are:

• Raytheon corporation; they make many types of munitions for the military including the tomahawk missile, the paveway laser guided missile, and the javelin weapons system.
• Boston Dynamics; a company that focuses on creating the most mobile and advancement robots on the planet.
• Boeing; a company that has been on the cutting edge of both commercial and defense plane development for many years.

Some of the top academic journals in the engineering field are:

• EE Times: an electrical engineering journal.
• Machine Design: A mechanical engineering journal.
• Flight International: An aerospace engineering journal.

Reflection: After reading Davis's and Massimo's posts about their fields of study, I gained new knowledge of how interconnected the science majors really are. Both posts gave me insight into fields that I had limited knowledge of and let me see that at their core, they are the same as my chosen field. All three fields have their roots in hard sciences and have the goal of increasing human knowledge and improving society. Before reading these posts, i considered all three fields to be drastically different in every way possible; I didn't even know that astronomers had to study math and physics. These posts helped to further my knowledge of these fields and realize the underlying connections that many seemingly unrelated majors share.

The Place of Emotion in Civil Discourse

Every argument has some level of emotional charge to it. The amount of emotion in an argument can vary from just enough to keep people interested in it to enough to cause murders. Obviously, having barely enough emotion to keep a people interested in an argument is not enough to engender a good discussion, while having enough to cause someone to become homicidal is too much. This begs the question; what is the proper amount and role of emotion in civil discourse?

"Its only logical"

Based on my experiences, I believe that the proper amount of emotion in an argument is enough to keep both sides fully invested in argument but not enough to cloud the facts and logic that are needed to have a reasonable and productive discussion. When this level of emotion is involved in civil discourse, every party involved is invested enough in the discourse that they will continue the discourse until one side has conclusively won the argument. This is the best point for any argument or discussion to get to because anything less than this will essentially lead to nothing new being determined during the discourse and all but ensuring that further discourse on the same topic will occur at a later time. Discourse is even more effective when this point can be reached without emotion becoming involved in the arguments themselves because this allows logic to rule the discussion, which allows for better overall arguments.

                                                                                                                                                           

When there is too little emotion to involved in a discussion, everyone will lose interest but those few people who can argue about anything for hours. Being one of those people, I have seen many times where someone has lost interest in a discussion and accepted my point even though it was completely ludicrous. This leads to ineffective discourse.

On the other hand, when too much emotion is involved in an argument, the discourse will be incredibly lively and involved, but many important details will be missed and the rationality of the arguments will suffer. This can be seen in the Deflategate controversy when fans and the NFL itself rushed to conclusions about whether the balls had been deflated instead of considering important details that could be very important to the situation. This glossing over of details because of emotions was highlighted when the NFL investigation of the incident did not consider that balls pumped up in a warm locker room will lose some pressure when they are introduced to cold weather. This lack of rationality that excess emotion can cause is just as destructive to effective discourse as too little emotion is.

Even if the proper amount of emotion for civil discourse could be known and measured, it would still be nearly impossible for that exact amount of emotion to be present in every discussion. Human emotions are too volatile and unpredictable to be controlled in a precise manner. Which means that how do we control our emotions?  May be a better question than how much emotion should we use?