What is Engineering?
Put as simply as possible, engineering is solving human problems! Using the application of technical and scientific knowledge engineers put judgment, imagination and reasoning to work in order to come up with new solutions to human problems or news ways to solve old problems.
The results of engineering is the production, design or / or operation of useful processes or objects. There are many major branches of engineering. Below we’ll discuss some of the major areas of engineering.
Civil engineering is a very broad field of engineering that itself is broken up into several different smaller categories. For the most part though, civil engineering deals with planning, construction and maintenance of public works or structures as they relate to water, earth or civilization.
Today most civil engineering has to do with bridges, power plants, roads, trains, water supply, structures, the environment flood control and traffic.
By contrast, computer engineering is a discipline that combines portions of both computer science and electrical engineering. Computer engineers often have additional training in areas like hardware or software design and integration. Computer engineers do not focus so much on physics and power as traditional mechanical engineers do, but are more concerned with overall computer functioning. They may focus on all aspects of computing, from design of microprocessors to circuit design and even integration of systems and larger networks.
Mechanical engineering is another broad subset of engineering that deals primarily with the application of physical principles for the analysis, design and manufacturing of mechanical systems as well as the maintenance of these systems. Some common subdisciplines include kinematics, mechanics, and the study of the energy of physical objects.
Mechanical engineers utilize principles surrounding force, heat and the conservation of energy and mass in their contribution to the design of aircraft, ground vehicles, cooling and heating systems, buildings, industrial machinery and much more.
For more information on the different types of engineering I invite you to perform your own search of the internet. There are many exciting subfields of engineering that you may have never even heard of yet. A good place to start is the Wikipedia page on engineering at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering.
