***Editor’s Note: To Celebrate Engineer’s Week (Feb 22-26) ECN will be publishing one engineer’s story per day and starting a new weekly section called “I Became An Engineer” that will launch next week. To share you story email kasey.panetta@advantagemedia.com***

Today’s (second because I missed Thursday’s) “Why I Became An Engineer Story” comes to us from ECN reader Ken Ports:

I was always good at math, but my high school interests were pretty much limited to my girlfriend (now my trophy wife of 49 years), and playing sports with my friends. At dinner one night, when I was a high school junior and we were being encouraged at school to apply to colleges, I asked my father, a Radio Engineer and a Vice President of Engineering, “What should I be when I grow up?”

He apparently had had a lousy day at work, and replied “Well, DON’T be an engineer.”

So I asked “In that case, what is the hardest major in college?”

He thought, then responded “Physics, I guess.”

And I said “OK, then I’ll do that.”  Which I did, and emerged many years later firmly grasping a Ph.D. in Solid State Physics. The mantra I had developed, though, while doing my thesis research in radiation effects in the sub-basement of a Physics Building, was that “all I want to do after graduation is to make things that I can hold in my hand and that somebody will buy from me”.

That’s what I told all the folks I interviewed with for employment, and when I graduated, I landed a job with Harris Semiconductor, making radiation hardened integrated circuits. After working there a year or so, I was chatting with my boss, making small talk, and asked him “So how do you like having a physicist on your staff?” He stared at me evenly for a moment, and said “I don’t HAVE any physicists on my staff.” And with that, I guess I had become an engineer.

Twenty five years later, I left my industry job and went to work at our local high tech university, the Florida Institute of Technology, as a full professor of Electrical Engineering and an Associate Dean of the College of Engineering. I mentioned more than a few times to my students that in the first Engineering Courses I had ever attended in my life, I was the Professor. Definitely a back door entry into the field.

Read the 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