I like being an engineer

A recent blog by my colleague, Peter Welander of Control Engineering got me thinking. He said that most engineers he has known didn’t enjoy being an engineer. I’m a chemical engineer, and I can only think of one profession I would rather be in – more about that later. Actually, it’s only a coincidence that I ever became an engineer. I attended a blue collar high school in the 1950s where practically no one went to college, and they certainly did not have anyone like a college counselor. There was sort of an unspoken thought that I would be the first member of my family to attend college, but I had no idea what I would take. One day a teacher said, “You’re good at math and science, so you should be an engineer. The die was cast.

I attended Illinois Inst. of Technology in Chicago, and commuted by bus. Again, it was pure chance that I took chemical engineering and I can’t remember what prompted me to choose that branch of engineering. In any case, I graduated in 1958, and my first job was at U.S. steel working in blast furnace research. That was followed by stints in project engineering at Kraft Foods, Abbott Laboratories, Sara Lee and a canning co-op in California. Some of these jobs were better than others—the canning co-op job was a bummer. But in truth, I loved them all.

One difference between Peter and me is that he said he didn’t have an opportunity to be a “pure” engineer”—he spent his time in bureaucracy: dealing with part numbers, creating bills of materials, etc. In contrast, everything I did was “pure” engineering. In every job I had, I was assigned a project and told to “get it done.” Some of these were trivial, such as installing a new cooker in a jelly process, but others were substantial. I was responsible for a new mayonnaise line at Kraft that ran 500 qt jars/min and included the first use of bulk glass at Kraft. My last project at Kraft was project manager for all of the processing and packaging equipment in a new $40 million plant in Allentown, PA.

In every one of these projects, I was responsible for the whole ball of wax. I had to analyze the project requirements, determine the equipment that was required, write the equipment specs, find manufacturers, write the purchase orders, be involved in equipment installation and startup and train the operators. If you can’t have fun with that, you shouldn’t be an engineer!

Peter mentioned engineers wanting MBA courses. Kraft had a program to pay for MBA courses, so I did take a couple of courses, but they were so boring that I soon gave that up. I did take graduate engineering courses, but never enough to get an advanced degree.

I mentioned that there was one profession that I have always wished that I had followed up on. That’s patent law. In my first job at U.S. Steel, they wanted everyone in research to keep their eyes open for the opportunities to get patents on what they were doing. I found the whole concept of patents; the focus on unique design factors of a process; to be fascinating, and so I got involved with the USS patent law department much more than many of my colleagues. I actually was offered jobs as a patent examiner at the patent office in Washington and, later in my career, as a patent engineer at Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville, OK. Both of those positions would have led to a patent law degree, but the timing wasn’t right for me to accept either of those positions.

In any case, I think engineering has been a great career, and the skills I learned in pure engineering have worked out well in my writing career. Except for the patent law, I wouldn’t change a day.

“Pa, he always said a man had to look spry for himself, because nobody would do it for him; your opportunities didn’t come knocking around, you had to hunt them down and hog-time them.” 

— Louis L’Amour