How To Know If You Wanna Be An Engineer 101

I remember what it was like being asked to choose a major for a career pathway for the rest of my life. It sounded that serious to me back then, and I’m sure it sounds just as serious for you right now. So if you’re stressed out and curious about how I chose my route, you’ve come to the right place. I am currently a Mechanical Engineer at UCI, and I love it here.

During my time at UCI, I set up the 3D print recycling lab that, just like it sounds, recycles plastic waste from all the other 3D print farms on campus. Some of my other M.E. friends are on the desert ATV racing team, satellite rocket team, and the hyperloop prototype team. Honestly, it's just like that one university from Big Hero 6 where all you need is a high-powered laptop and a dream. As for technical knowledge, you’re given an applicable toolbox of expertise in your studies, but the real fun comes from joining project teams.

I’ll stop trying to sell you on engineering, because I can go on and on, so let me address why you’re reading this. Do you want to be an engineer or not? Let me know if any of these categories apply to you:

- If you see something broken and you need to fix it.

- If you see something not broken and you need to improve on it.

- If you see the world in logical systems, flowcharts, and how every minute detail affects everything.

The deal breaker isn’t being good at math or CADing. They’re gonna teach you those tools anyway. It’s if you have an inexplicable urge to know what’s going on inside every mechanism and if you are the type of person that sees any insurmountable problem as totally surmountable.

If not, don’t worry about it! There are so many other majors to choose from and engineering really is not for everyone.

If yes, welcome to the wonderful world of engineering!

What It Takes To Be Seen:

A good GPA is nice to have when applying to engineering programs. However, engineering admissions teams are looking for more than just a metric. They’re looking for people who can effectively translate all the scientific jargon to cross-disciplinary colleagues, materialize their ideas and passions into reality, and give back to the world using the skills they’ve developed in their time at university. This is a very broad and vague list of virtues, so hopefully, I can shed a little light on how this might look realistically, for a high school student… at least in my case.

My A-G coursework only partly showed an interest in physics and a little bit of math, so that lent the extracurricular section to carrying my application. Going in order of the intangible virtues listed earlier, my time was quite evenly split between volunteering at a children’s science center, CAD prototyping/3D printing, and documentary filmmaking.

1) I honestly had a lot of fun at the children’s science center because I was on the team hosting science experiments for the kids. But the reason I’m including this very non-engineering sounding tidbit is because of the communication skills gained from making small CD hoverboards and elephant toothpaste volcanoes. The science center gave us only the ingredients for the experiment and procedures to perform them. It was on us, the volunteers, to relay what was going on at a microscopic, sometimes molecular level, to the little kids. And these skills transfer well when scaling up the complexity of engineering projects. This summer I was an Intern Engineer at a company of many cross-disciplinary coworkers. And in the end, presenting the inner workings of my project to Data Analysts, Industrial Engineers, and Execs required skills transferable from the kids’ science experiments. It really does not matter what you fill your time with in high school, because you are always learning and growing your skills. But you really want to show colleges what you can do with your skills and the potential you hold when given an opportunity to grow at their school.

2) 3D printing is a very ‘engineer-y’ hobby to have, but the demonstration of an engineering mindset can be applied to a lot of hobbies as well. (Also, I’m not sure 3D printing as a standalone hobby will hold as much weight as it used to, due to the autonomous nature of the new printers.) Nowadays everyone has an advanced 3D printer in their garage, but when I was applying to colleges, 3D print path programming was not optimized in the slightest. And looking back, I really appreciate the manual aspect of getting a design to actually print. It was a labor of love. This was one of my ‘passion projects’: Designing a perfect Balisong Trainer. This years-long butterfly (trainer) knife project was a quirky and pretty eye-catching thing. I imagine most high schoolers typically don’t spend their time 3D modeling showy switchblades and pushing the boundaries of desktop prototyping. So when talking a lot about refining the design and iteration for both the print and the printer, I’m sure the pioneering spirit and engineering foundation stood out to the admissions team. Tolerance gaps, extruder path programming, density, and weight distribution are all standard engineering principles wrapped in 3D print packaging. So this project demonstrated the capacity to learn across different fields of engineering as well as the drive required to bring an idea to life, no matter the obstacles.

3) The third and last thing I want to touch upon for engineering admissions advice is teachability. You don’t need to know everything, and you won’t know everything. Otherwise, why are you going to college? I was in the film program at my high school, an elective focus chosen in the freshman year, and I was really out of my element going in. I talked a lot in my essays about the learning curve for camerawork, logistics control, and color design for a documentary I filmed my senior year, in a very I-know-my-stuff kind of way. But directly afterward, I backtracked to show how much I had to learn and the effort put into understanding the world of film in order to come to this crowning achievement.

That’s really all I have to say for the engineering side of things, at least the things I thought were interesting to highlight in my application. But here’s everything I had on my application, in case you want a list instead of an essay:

- Presidential Volunteer Service Award

- 100+ hours of volunteer service

- Congressional Award

- Challenge for setting and achieving personal goals focused on Volunteering, Fitness, Personal Development, and Expedition

- Volunteering at a children’s science center

- 3D CAD design and 3D print hobbying

- Robotics hobby

- Filmmaking hobby

- Marathon training

- Church worship team and youth ministry volunteering

- Yearbook team

- Part-time job at movie theater

- UC COSMOS Robotics Program

- I highly recommend checking this out. It is a month-long STEM program across the UC’s open to high schoolers.

I applied for the robotics program at UCSD, but there are so many other fields and campuses available. I hope this engineering application crash course helped you in your prep for engineering life and good luck on your applications!

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