I knew little about engineering as a child; most children don't, unless they are related to an engineer. Through my pre-college education, I was exposed to the arts, humanities, mathematics, and the “basic sciences”—I had heard of engineers, but had never met one personally. In college, I met engineering students. Their disciplined thought and empirical perspective made it easy to believe that they were robotic nerds, the anti-matter analog to art and intellect.

It turns out, I wasn't wrong, or right. I was just a normal, purist zealot crossing twenty. I now see engineering through a different scope. Engineers find accurate solutions to real-world, complex problems. This means that they can find and quantify paths through boundaries that cannot readily be crossed by the “purer” sciences. Engineers solve problems as we reach them, punching holes in that mystic fabric of the fundamental quandaries that unravel intuition as they hide understanding. Engineering might be defined as the development of solutions to problems encountered by humans, yet beyond the reach of their comprehensive theories. It is the art and science of solving real problems.

I had a summer job in college, working for a physicist who worked for an engineer. I spent months on a complex derivation. When I presented my results to my boss's boss, he looked only at the bottom line of the last page, shoved the thick solution back toward me, and said, “It's wrong.”