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.