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What the heck is an engineer anyway?

By Adam RubenNov. 15, 2017 , 11:30 AM

Fisrt part
I always knew I wanted to study biology. But before enrolling in college, my university
threw me a curveball: Did I want to major in science or engineering?

It was the first time I’d even heard of engineering as a field—at least outside the context of
driving trains. It was never a subject in school—those were social studies, English, gym—
and now I had to choose between enrolling in the School of Engineering or the School of
Everything Else. Those really were the two choices. The only degrees my school offered
computer science—or a Bachelor of Science in Engineering.

What was this so-called “engineering”? And how did it somehow become so prominent
that it balanced against arts-and-sciences-and-politics-and-sociology-and-economics-and-
philosophy? If the world could be divided into engineering and everything else, why had I
never heard of engineering?

I remember running frantically through a college fair, asking every booth attendant the
same questions: What’s an engineer? How is an engineer different from a scientist? And,
most importantly, can I keep this pen?

Second part

One of the first answers someone gave me was that “engineers solve problems.” Neat.
Maybe I should be an engineer. Scientists, on the other hand, … do what with problems?
Ignore them? Describe them? Wish for them to go away? Create them? Exacerbate them?

I next asked the most biased possible person: the dean of my university’s engineering
school. “There are no jobs for scientists!” he exclaimed. “There are always jobs for
engineers!”

“Aha,” I thought. “Because they solve problems.”

And that’s how I (a) joined the engineering school and (b) ran screaming from the
engineering school a year and a half later, after scoring a 20% on my Introduction to
Chemical Engineering midterm.

Twenty years later, I’m a scientist (with a job—take that, engineering dean), but I still have
no idea where to draw the line between science and engineering. In one of my graduate
school rotations, for example, I worked on protein engineering. But I was enrolled in the
biology department—and the lab where I rotated was in the chemistry department.
 It’s not something I think about a lot. I don’t stay awake wondering whether a degree from
the School of Engineering would have helped me solve more problems. (In fact, in light of
my midterm score, I think it would have created some.) But the subject resurfaced recently
when I gave a talk at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory about how
members of the public view scientists. Someone approached me afterward to suggest that
I expand the talk to include the public perception of engineers.

The comment surprised me. I had assumed that engineers are kind of subsumed within
the umbrella of science. Were engineers really listening to a talk about scientists and
thinking, “Nah, that’s not me”?

Third part

I asked Science Careers reporter Maggie Kuo, who trained as a biomedical engineer, what

she had understood as the distinction between the two when she chose her field.
“Engineers build things,” she wrote, “and scientists understand things.”

So, do engineers not understand what they build? Like, they make a car, but then they
think the car is magic? Or, when it would be helpful for scientists’ research to build
something, do they just shrug and go home?

I spent some time Googling “science vs engineering.” It seems a lot of people have asked
this question. (Hopefully these people are 12th graders deciding their life’s path, not
scientists and engineers wondering what they’re supposed to be doing at work.) In fact, it
came up as Google Autocomplete’s fifth-most-suggested closing for “science vs,” with the
first four being “religion,” “pseudoscience,” “God,” and “magic.”

One distinction I read is that “science creates questions, while engineering creates
solutions.” This almost sounds like it gives engineers license to be annoyed with scientists.
I can hear them now: “Dang, all we do is create solutions, but those jerks in the science
department just keep asking more questions!”

Another is that “engineers solve real problems, while scientists solve theoretical problems.”
This explanation sounds like it was written to deliberately shortchange scientists—because
when a theoretical problem has a theoretical solution, what’s to say they’re not both a
bunch of bull? How many roads must a man walk down? Five. Good job, scientists.

I’ve also read that “all scientists are engineers, but not all engineers are scientists.” By this
logic, I’m clearly underpaid, because I’m doing two jobs.

Here’s an interesting one: “Engineers are hard workers, while scientists are free workers.”
While I’ve certainly known many scientists who essentially work for free (hooray for
postdocs!), I think this oversimplification captures the romantic misperceptions about both
fields. We want to see scientists as visionaries, exploring the corridors of the possible. And
we want to see engineers as highly competent but narrowly focused, ensuring that the
joists of those corridors have been machined to the proper specifications.

Fourth part

Many of these aphorisms reinforce the too facile portrayal of scientists as theorists and
explorers, while engineers are solvers of real-world problems. Indeed, this is the most
common characterization of scientists versus engineers. It reminds me of two books by the
same author that my 6-year-old daughter owns: Rosie Revere, Engineer and Ada Twist,
Scientist. Both are great rhyming stories about kids destined for certain careers based on
their talents and proclivities. Rosie Revere builds awesome machines that she sketches on
graph paper. Ada Twist, on the other hand, basically just asks “why?” a lot.
The problem with this representation is that it discounts the existence of applied scientists,
and of theoretical engineers—both of which are real. Often scientists solve problems, and
often engineers ask “why?” (Granted, this is sometimes because scientists are solving
problems that engineers inadvertently created by asking “why?” and because engineers
are asking, “Why … did the scientists think they could solve this problem?”)

The predominant feeling that I got from reading a Google search full of suggested
answers, however, is that the distinction between science and engineering feels forced. It’s
as though someone demanded that the difference had to be summarized in a pithy
sentence. But the subtext is that the two aren’t all that different—at least, not to scientists
and engineers.

I hope this article doesn’t start an internet flame war between the two camps. (Scientists: “I
will investigate why you suck.” Engineers: “I don’t care why, but I will quantify, to five
decimal places, exactly how much you suck.”)

I hope, instead, that it answers my question from 20 years ago, a question many science
trainees face today: What’s the difference between a scientist and an engineer?

Taken from: https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2017/11/what-heck-engineer-anyway