#11 -- Think I wasn't an Engineer

It's been a long time since I came to the conclusion that I was definitely an engineer. Back in high school, things were a bit hazy. Didn't really know what I wanted to do or be when I grew up. My chemistry teacher (regular and AP...yes, I was in AP chemistry...geek) suggested that because I "liked" chemistry and math I should be a Chemical Engineer. So, when my college apps came around, I signed on as such and never looked back once.

Today, we had a visiting lecturer at school, and so I went to his seminar; part to listen, part to show my face, and part for the donuts afterwards. the lecturer graduated from my school a few years ago with his MS in ChemEng, has done some industry work, and is now, apparently, a possible candidate for one of the open faculty positions here. Anyhow, I just got back from the lecture, and I'm still a little dazed. Not from the presentation; that was fine, nothing very "over-my-head" there. The oddity came with two comments that were made. One by the presenter, and the other by another guy in the crowd.

So at the end of this guy's presentation (which was about modeling efforts and their applicability to controlling industrial processes) he mentioned that his brother had put together a contest for his family. The brother lives in Utah, and he built an eight-foot snowman in his front yard near the beginning of the year, and had everyone in the family guess how long it would last before it became just a scattering of coal/carrot/sticks upon the grassy ground.

When the proposed contest was announced, this guy said to himself (paraphrased), "Okay, I'm an engineer. I have some basic understanding of the principles at work here and a bunch of school/work books. I should be able to come up with a quasi-accurate model and predict how long this process will take with a decent degree of precision. (Convection, radiation, historical temperature cycles, etc) " So, he broke out the books, stayed up late for a few hours, and put together a semi-coherent model that he felt would give a good approximation of "Frosty's" demise time. His answer: June 6th.

Well to say the least, it's not even June 6th yet, and as part of his presentation, he had posted already a picture of the scattered remains of the snowman in question. The winner was apparently the brother that made up the challenge. He guessed March 13th and was spot on. Now, the guess isn't the thing that got me. What got me was the fact that this guy actually spent a number of hours working up an engineering model to predict the time to melt a snowman. Not really something that I'd do. At that time, I shrugged it off as just one of the oddities, and not something that would come up again any time soon.

I mean, I had heard a number of people mention things like this before. One guy that I had some undergraduate classes with had a dad that would make his own lip balm. By hand. Then there's that whole Project Euler thing on the internet. They're all over, sure. I know that there are definitely people out there that like to do things like this on their free time. I just never thought that I'd personally come across two of them in the same month, let alone the same hour.

So, after a few questions and meandering answers, this guy in the audience raises his hands and makes a comment about said "snowman competition" and how it reminded him of something he had done once. He said that he watched a "Mythbusters" episode (which is a great show that I'd recommend heartily to just about anyone, almost as much as I'd recommend "Dirty Jobs", which is probably the best show on cable tv nowadays) where they set out to prove that you couldn't light a Christmas tree on fire using only strings of Christmas tree lights. He said that they came to the conclusion that someone couldn't light a tree on fire with only a string of lights.

Well, this guy didn't like their conclusion obviously (he'd been told that Christmas trees do this more often than zero times in a trillion) and so what does he do? He busts out his engineering books and builds a model to try and disprove Mythbusters. Numerous hours of tedium ensue.

Now, like I said earlier, I've considered myself to be an engineer for some time now. I enjoy the process of solving problems, I've enjoyed math and science since I was a kid, I grew up considering myself to be part of the "geek" crowd. So why not? Why not, you say? Well, let me tell you why not. I don't think that I'd ever in a million years decide to break out my old engineering books and try to build a model of anything during my spare time. There's too much else that I'd rather be doing. And so, for the first time in a LONG while, I found myself wondering:

Am I really an engineer?

I don't know if I've answered it yet.