We live in a world full of many assumptions that are almost always considered to be facts. There are driving forces that convince the people on what they want to believe, with no effort to inquire and verify if it’s true. More often than not, they are based on rash conclusions. The problem is that they do not stay trivial. And the field of engineering is not at all exempted. The engineering myths and lies debunked!
There are a lot of myths that need to be debunked about engineering. It needs to be understood especially among those not in the field, because false perceptions may yield unfavorable conditions. Certain expectations, built on the wrong premises, for engineers have to be realistic enough to be met. Otherwise, engineers are bound to perform the impossible of them to do.
Listed below are some of the most common myths about engineering everyone should be aware about, to establish that they are all but myths.
Source: Blogspot (Engineering Myths Busted)
Engineers know everything about engineering.
This common belief pains so many engineers who are asked to deliver anything out of their field – I mean if you are a chemical engineer, you are asked to design and build a house, but that’s a job of a civil engineer; or you are tasked to design a car’s machine when you are an electronics engineer. That’s absurd. An engineer, even when spoken at specific, cannot know every bit of his field as there are still sub-fields. Sure, the structural engineer has an idea about what a geotechnical engineer does, since both are under the umbrella of civil engineering. But there are study concentrations after college, when it comes to work. The same goes to projects as there are different departments and collaborations in each, so one cannot expect an engineer to know all about a project.
Source: Tumblr (Engineering Myths Busted)
Engineers should know how to operate equipment.
In case you missed it, we have technicians and operators to do that. While it is part of the job to be familiar of different kinds of equipment, the operation and maintenance of such aren’t on the hands of the engineer. Engineers have an idea about equipment but not entirely, not the buttons and maneuvers. The technician knows by experience what to do about them, while the engineer knows why it has to be done.
Source: Giphy (Engineering Myths Busted)
Engineers are more valuable than scientists.
Some of the great debates there is about humankind is about which offers more to life: science or engineering? There are similarities between the two, like both having to deal with the math and the natural world, but there are also differences which yield us to the answer – science finds and establishes facts out of what is already existing, while engineering makes such facts useful to society by developing devices, products, structures, machines and systems. Both fields, which are continually developing, have to coexist, since engineering is the application of sciences.
These are only three among the many. What are engineering myths have you experienced or heard firsthand?
