I’m a professor and senior researcher in mechanical engineering with a specialty in biomechanics, biodevices, and biomaterials. Some people would call me a biomedical engineer. Either way, I think I’d be equally happy being an engineer who designs, builds, and fixes robots, bridges, or spaceships. But, where did this interest in engineering come from? As I look back, I can see the early roots of this passion in my family’s influence (i.e. nurture) and my own personality (i.e. nature).
My grandfather was an illiterate peasant farmer in a European village who had a knack for therapeutically massaging and manipulating the painful, sprained, bruised, or broken limbs and joints of other farmers who were injured during work. This is one of my earliest memories in life. My parents were also mechanically inclined. Father was a peasant farmer, factory laborer, and master carpenter, while mother was an expert seamstress also skilled at baking, cooking, crocheting, embroidering, and knitting.
When I was a very young kid, I often disobeyed my parents by sneaking into the tool shed to play with all those interesting tools. For me, playing meant hammering nails into the wooden floor, pushing manual lawnmowers around, and taking out the car jack to lift up the back of my father’s car. I sustained at least one injury that remains visible to this day.
Later on, when I was a student in high school, I really enjoyed and excelled in my courses in mechanical drawing, mathematics, and chemistry, but I also liked my courses in physics, biology, and computers. My chemistry teacher used to leave the classroom door unlocked, so my friend and I could come in by ourselves after school hours to do chemistry experiments—unsupervised! It’s lucky we didn’t blow up ourselves or the school! I even thought about becoming an architect or a chemist.
And so, when it was time for me to apply to university, I wasn’t necessarily sure that engineering was for me. I didn’t know who to talk to. I didn’t know what to read. I didn’t know where to visit. I truly wish I would have had a resource to answer my questions about what an education, and later a career, in engineering was really like. This would have saved me time and stress in making my career decisions.
Over the decades, I’ve met many people in the same situation I was in who have many of the same questions, such as: high school students wondering whether they should enroll in engineering at university; engineering students pondering whether to get an industry position after graduation or do a master’s or doctoral degree; master’s and doctoral students in engineering dealing with concerns about applying for jobs in university, industry, or government; and engineers already in the workforce trying to figure out the daily ethical, financial, interpersonal, and technological challenges they face.
I’ve had the privilege of personally communicating with such folks over coffee, by phone, or by email. In retrospect, I wish I had a ready-to-go resource, like a book or audio or video or website, that I could also have passed on that addressed their concerns perhaps more effectively than I could. Sadly, many engineers are never really taught any career skills in university or even by their bosses in the workplace. They are forced to informally learn them as they go along, if at all. These career skills, however, are vitally important for a successful and satisfying career in engineering.
And so, this was my motivation in writing this modest little book. It’s intended to address many practical questions about engineering regardless of specialty, such as university education, industry opportunities, business aspects, professional certifications, scientific fundamentals and methodologies, workplace communication and leadership, etc. As someone once said, I hope this book is as practical as a handle on a suitcase. Also, my goal is that the book gives readers a kind of grander poetic vision for who an engineer is and what an engineer does in helping design, build, and sustain human civilization.
This book is a series of personal conversation-style letters written to fictional people whom I call Nick and Natasha. It deals with their entire engineering career from early university education, then to the workplace, and then to retirement. It’s not meant to be a scholarly textbook that addresses everything imaginable in a rigorous and systematic way. Nor does it presume or pretend to have all the right answers or tell people exactly what they should do in all situations. Rather, the letters are intended to be more like pearls of wisdom (I hope!) strung together that can help guide and mentor the next generation of engineers. With this in mind, let’s now turn to the subject at hand.
Radovan Zdero, PhD, CEng, MIMechE