One of the greatest parts of joining the engineering community is learning how many cool things there are out there that you never knew existed. Coming in as a Freshmen, who was just accepted to a series of top universities, I am sure that you believe you know a decent amount of information, but the thing you learn as an engineer in training, is that in reality the average person is blind to the amount of science in the world. For example, imagine a simple dryer, dishwasher or even a microwave that displays a simple message like “done” or “ready”; I consider these displays to be relatively simple compared to programs and apps that take lines and lines of code. The funny thing is that I consider the display simple, yet, the average person would not be able to program the simple display. Now consider this example and apply it to most technology that is being produced in these day in age. We use cell phones everyday, but don’t know how advance they truly are. Everything is so much more advance than the average human eye can even imagine. As you study engineering, you will begin to learn laws, theories and equations that you never knew even existed or even the fact that people spent their lives studying these fields. Another example, I am a chemical engineer that is taking a class on large scale separations of materials like oil or various other chemicals. As the semester comes to an end, I have learned so many equations and laws that were named after people that the world have never even heard of. People have heard of Einstein’s E=mc^2 equation, but have never heard of Gibb’s phase rule which is almost just as important in this day and age. Engineering is a field that will teach you so many things that you never dreamed existed, but at the same time, will show you how much you truly don’t know about the world’s technologies. Strap on your thinking cap and be prepared to learn all types of cool things.
