Engineering Career Research Paper

Transitioning from high school to college as an engineering major may gave given you the hope of not having to endure yearly written language arts classes. The truth is, however, as an engineer and as an engineering student towards your upperclassman projects, you will be tasked with writing proposals, technical reports, preliminary and critical design reports, status reports, manuals, marketing material, justifications and specifications, and this is only a summarized list. Moreover, depending on the negative impact your product could have if something were to go wrong, your reports, manuals, and instructions should be clear, and not open to ambiguity, in order to prevent misuse.

The writing structure you will utilize as an engineer will not be the same structure a literature major would use. Your writing as an engineer will be different from the writing you have completed in literature classes in that it will be passive, and will be excruciatingly descriptive in order to avoid ambiguity. Engineers in all fields have heavy workloads that include large amounts of written communication, therefore one must learn the necessary skills before graduation in order to be a better qualified candidate for

an engineering position. If you are to work your way up in to project management, you will be writing proposals constantly, these documents could be for raising awareness, acquiring necessary funds, or to take part in a program, such as a response to a government Request for Proposal (RFP).
While the bulk of your engineering position upon graduation will consist of structural analysis, component design, sub-systems integration, etc.

etc. you can be assured that you will be writing as well, and that is when your written communication skills will either set you apart for the better, or for the worst. Engineers have always had to endure the laborious task of writing, standards for safety and reliability have been in place since the creation of regulatory divisions of government such as the Federal Aviation Administration, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), engineers in the aeronautics field must comply to all standards set by the FAA and provide the specifications, reports, and justifications before a single aircraft can be

sold.
As an engineering student myself, I did not expect the intensity of the writing load to be as high as it currently is in the aerospace industry. In order to become a more qualified candidate for employment myself, I must adhere to the writing standards and structures set by regulatory organizations. In my experience as project manager of the AIAA Design-Build-Fly team on campus, my team and I have had to write three funding proposals, a Conceptual Design Review, a Preliminary Design Review, a Critical Design Review, a Proposal for Competition Entry, a Detail Design Report, and a Test Readiness Review, aside from monthly status updates to the university. If writing loads are proportional to the size and impact of the projects themselves, please take in to account that the AIAA DBF Team is building small unmanned aerial vehicles, with that considered one can only imagine the workload set upon a team working on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Throughout your studies, you must consider that you will be writing a substantial amount, even as an engineer, and in order to be able to utilize written communication effectively and to your advantage, you will need to develop these crucial skills as a student.