My Engineering Philosophy

Perfectionism has run through my veins since my early beginnings. In fact, I recall spending hours upon hours on a mathematics problem set during elementary school because I refused to complete the project without having done it using my full effort and looking over it multiple times. Naturally, when it came to deciding on a career, I was stuck. What path or major would lead me to the “perfect” career? I had no idea what my passion was. However, I soon realized that to lead a successful life, this would mean, at least for myself, solving problems that I think are worth and needing to be solved. A way that I thought I could do this was through engineering, and this thought has been confirmed multiple times as I immerse myself in the engineering community and learn about different opportunities for problem-solving that can be found in various communities (thanks to the need to find such an opportunity for Praxis II). The vast possibilities available through engineering give me the opportunity to tackle vastly different problems, from developing artificial intelligence systems that adapt and learn based on example sets, to research on tissue regeneration. From the perfectionism rooted in my personality, I came into engineering thinking that I would strive for the “perfect” design. However, it soon became apparent that perfection would not be possible, simply because there are too many factors up for consideration. The notion of “integrated system design” raises this point, as engineers must design systems by looking at the whole system and its context, meaning that the entirety of the system should be taken under holistic consideration to be successfully designed [1]. As such, “perfection” is an unachievable idea, as a solution that is seemingly “perfect” is both a subjective rating as well as near impossible to achieve under every given consideration. In light of this, I soon became focused on elegant designs instead. An elegant design is one that demonstrates functionality, effectiveness, and most importantly, simplicity. My take on elegance is something that gives the feeling of being correct—once it is perceived, there seems to be no other way that makes as much sense.
In terms of my other values, considering the practice of integrated system design, I naturally gravitated towards having one of my core values involving interaction with others during the design process. I find interaction with team members to be extremely valuable because ideas are bounced off of one another, so that the individual values and interpretation of each team member contributes to creating a solution that best takes the entirety of the opportunity and its context into consideration. Obviously, the interaction with stakeholders is crucial to the design process because it provides grounds for design requirements, which helps ensure that our developed design solution effectively meets the interests and the needs of those involved with the opportunity. However, I acknowledge that my communicative abilities are an area of growth, as I am often not comfortable with pitching my ideas, especially in formal settings. Moreover, I find the task of developing new ideas as a challenge in itself, which is why I have employed tools such as SCAMPER. In fact, I have adopted this tool to help conceive new concepts, especially by substituting one concept with another that achieves the same, or a similar function (substitution was used heavily during our team preparation for Praxis II’s Showcase presentation). Nevertheless, an area of strength is my ability to reject ideas that do not meet our objectives or requirements by employing tools such as rating matrices. This is because I take a particular interest in considering the details of the aspects of a design opportunity. The use of a ratings matrix requires special attention as it necessitates the explicit consideration of multiple requirements that may be of varying importance. Thus, I have used various design process tools to further improve my design skill set.