What is the typical day of an engineer at work?

Hi Olivia,

I really like how you are opening your mind to a different possibility and asking questions!

Engineer is really just a short-hand term for "problem solver" and there is a whole world full of interesting and important problems to work on.

I am a software developer and I have spent much of my career trying to make computers work better. I work as part of a team where each member has a different strength. Some people create mathematical models of computer systems while others write programs which explore computer performance. The data we collect we feed into models and then try to predict future performance. We take those predictions to other teams that build the hardware and make changes to improve the product.

Communicating with people is a big part of modern engineering. We often have meetings to set goals, talk about challenges with current work, discuss future work directions and determine where we need to assign more resources (people or equipment generally). Sending and responding to email is also crucial skill. Crafting a good email can be challenging; it must be succinct, factual and timely.

My favorite part of "engineering" is working on problems. As a software developer, the problems I solve are often how do I make someone else's (or my own!) software better. Programs are yet another form of communication. They act as recipes for computers to follow to solve a problem, but they are often infused with the personality of the original programmer. It is possible to write two programs that solve the same problem where one is impossible to maintain and the other is a joy. As a professional, I strive to write code that is clear and correct.

Engineering is the process of solving a never-ending stream of problems. Sometimes my projects can last months or even years, some projects can be completed in an afternoon. But I always have a sense of growth as I learn how to solve new problems and I feel pride when my solutions make other people's lives better.

I hope you continue to explore engineering disciplines!

Hi Olivia,

"A typical day of engineering" is very hard to answer because it depends on what day it is, what field the engineer is in and what time of the year it is. Before becoming an engineer, I asked this question a lot and the answers were all different, so what I will do is give you an overview of a week in the life of a hydraulics engineer based on my experience. The below is my "typical week" if there is such a thing.

Monday:
We submitted proposal last week which the client approved so the morning is spent ensuring that the team understands their role in the coming weeks and they are available (a lot of engineering is managing people, time and budgets. Your own, your teams and the expectations of the client.)
With this mostly achieved by mid morning I now move onto proposal writing. This in essence is marketing your firm and a little bit of yourself to potential clients. The client is looking for a firm to complete a project (expanding water systems, building a new treatment plant, etc.) and you need to prove to them that not only can you do the work but that you understand them. (This is basically technical writing with a marketing spin on it. You need to be good at explain engineering concepts to people who don't do engineering for a living. Could you explain for instance how a water treatment plant works, what is its purpose and the different options for building it). With a pretty good start on the proposal, Monday draws to a close.

Tuesday
The day begins with adding more to the proposal (is going to be around 12 pages), reading other proposal (to add in some being wording) and then polishing it up (this means printing it out and re-reading it over again to make sure it makes sense) ready to be sent out for review by the proposal team.
It's lunch time by now and the afternoon is taking up by run hydraulic models and problem solving. The client wants to build a stormwater tank to prevent flooding during a 10 year storm. They want to know how big is the tank and what the flooding will be in a 20 year storm. We run various hydraulic simulations to answer this and other questions. This provides the client with a variety of solutions, the effects each will have on flooding experienced by the residence and how much each solution would cost. (The hydraulic model we use are more sophisticated versions on of free ones you can download such as EPANet (Water supply), HEC-HMS (stormwater), HEC-RAS (River channels). We also use a lot of ArcGIS/MapInfo for GIS and AutoCAD/Revit for drawings). With a couple of variable solutions from the model in hand, Wednesday draws to a close.

Wednesday
Wednesday is filled with updating the proposal based on feedback from the proposal team, discussion with the client about the results tank design alternatives, updating some training slides for a client presentation the next day.

Thursday
The morning is spent presenting a training workshop to the client about green infrastructure and how it could be a benefit to the client for resolving flooding and treating stormwater (Green infrastructure covers a variety of devices ranging from permeable pavement and detention ponds to swales and bioretention).
The afternoon begins with updating a water supply model with additional pipe network, consumer water demands, pump curves. This involves a lot of work in excel, GIS and modeling software (I can speak for other disciplines of engineering but for hydraulics (subset of Civil Engineering), excel is one of the many tools were the better you are at it, the easier your job will be. For the most part you can get away without any knowledge of coding, but you will never get away from excel, GIS/AutoCAD and word. The better you are at these, the easier your job will become.) With the model setup ready to run, the day draws to a close.

Friday
Yay its Friday, time to relax, just kidding. The day starts with meetings. Meetings with clients, meeting with teams, meetings with managers (its end of year so of course performance reviews) and finally some modeling. Unfortunately the model I was working on is over predicting the level in the water supply tanks and they are flooding! Lucky this is a simulation. The remainder of the day is spent trouble shooting what could be wrong and they trying a different approach. (Problems solving is a huge part of engineering. So regardless of which field of engineering you choose, you are being paid to solve problems.)
As Friday draws to a close, the model is still not predicting how it should, ah but that's a problem for another day. That day being Monday.