***Editor’s Note: The “I Became An Engineer” blog runs every friday. To share your story email sarah.goncalves@advantagemedia.com***
This week’s story is brought to us by reader Jeffrey Lapak, Enterprise Industry and Operations Strategic Manager & Associate Director, UNH-IOL.
I suppose I was interested in engineering before I could even form real memories. When I was only a few months old, I took the shade off a lamp and decided to play with it in my crib. Shortly thereafter, I set fire to the mattress!
Despite the fact that I nearly killed myself and my twin brother, my parents continued to encourage me to think about how things worked instead of pressuring me into something safer.
Then, as soon as I had the dexterity to use a screwdriver I took apart a typewriter to try and fix a sticky key (yes, we still had those when I was growing up). Within a couple of hours, I had successfully dismantled it into unrecognizable pieces and learned a valuable lesson: taking things apart is often easier than putting them together.
I had the opportunity to get involved with Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping in high school. This system involved some basic programming and lots of engineering concepts. Our use case was to study the 205-acre farm that my school was located on, cataloging the different species of plants and animals, as well as monitoring the health of the pine forest in partnership with a local university outreach program.
As part of the mapping team, I was fortunate enough to speak to over a thousand other users at a developer’s conference and, as a 15 year old, this was a pretty big deal. The talk itself was on the users’ experience with the software and how we thought things could be improved. Here was a group of much older and more experienced folks listening to a kid, not just for the entertainment of it, but to take feedback and make something better.
To me that is the magic of the engineering mindset—where the process you use, your gender, or the color of your skin doesn’t matter. Engineers just want to make things better or sometimes just make them possible. Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, this talk was probably one of the more influential reasons I ended up in engineering in college.
I selected Electrical Engineering as my choice of program. It certainly made sense based on my interests in computers and software at the time. Serendipitously, this choice led to an opportunity to get involved with data communications and computer networking, which is the field I am still involved with today as the Associate Director of the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL). The UNH-IOL is a unique opportunity that allows me to stay involved with hundreds of companies developing products in the data communications field, while also upholding a mission to train the next generation of engineers. It’s gratifying to both work in the field and help educate students at the same time.
Despite my good fortune, I believe I would have been successful and happy in any of the engineering or hard science disciplines, as it is not just about the work but the way of thinking that appeals to me. I believe that if every student is afforded the opportunity to have the kind of experience I had at an early age, there wouldn’t necessarily be more engineers, but there would be a lot more innovation and collaboration towards solving problems among every discipline.
Read other stories, here:
- A Note From The Editor: An Engineer’s Story
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A Lunch Box
- I Became An Engineer: Because of Christmas Lights
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of The Cool Jackets
- I Became An Engineer: Because My Dad Said Not To
- I Became An Engineer: Despite Being Bad At Math
- I Became An Engineer: Because of Uncle Chet
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Can’t Stop Asking ‘Why?’
- I Became An Engineer: Because of Star Trek (Specifically Montgomery Scott)
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Was A Really Lucky Nerd
- I Became An Engineer: But ‘Nobody Knows’ Why
- I Became An Engineer: Because of Nuclear Submarines
- I Became An Engineer: Because of a Sewing Machine
- I Became An Engineer: Because No One Was Hiring Shoe Salesmen
- I Became An Engineer: Because of Mr. Kenny, the TV/Radio Repair Man
- I Became An Engineer: Because of a Book (And My Mom)
- I Became An Engineer: Because of a Cattle Ranch
- I Became An Engineer: Because of a Wise Father and the Possibility of Death
- I Became An Engineer: Because of An Evil Mastermind
- I Became An Engineer: To Get Off the Tractor
- I Became An Engineer: Because of My Rodeo Coach
- I Became An Engineer: Because the Air Force Equipment Kept Breaking
- I Became an Engineer: Because My Mom Let Me Take Apart the Old Vacuum
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Liked Tearing My Toys Apart
- I Became An Engineer: Because of the Mysterious Glowing Tubes
- I Became An Engineer: Because of My Father, Star Trek, and Music
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Was Tired of Sweating
- I Became An Engineer: But Almost the Wrong Kind
- I Became an Engineer: Because of a Car
- I Became An Engineer: Because of a Trip to Disney World
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Ran Out of Programming Classes
- I Became An Engineer: Because of My Best Friend Joe
- I Became an Engineer: Because I Loved Languages
- I Became An Engineer: Because of a Hypothetical Hovercraft
- I Became An Engineer: Because of My Uncle’s Girlfriend’s Brother-in-Law
- I Became An Engineer: Because of Genetics
