Enginerding

My son and I were recently spending a morning at library story-time.  He was doing all the things he normally does: avoiding confrontation with other children by waiting patiently for his 'milkshake' shaker (and consequently ending up getting it dead last), sorting the toys into the correct bins (ie: blocks and musical instruments DO NOT mix!!), and carefully popping individual bubbles (instead of waving his arms around all willy-nilly).  To me, this is normal behavior...but to the sweet grandmother of another child who was sitting next to me, apparently this struck her as odd.  Odd enough, at least, to make this comment: "I think you have a future engineer on your hands!!"

Uh, excuse me...what?  I mean, thanks.  I think.  No, no...thank you, you clearly meant it as a compliment.  It's just that I have a lot of knowledge about engineers, definitely more than your average person.  You see, I will be 30 years old very soon, and I have spent all but 8 months of that living with an engineer or future engineer.  And even during those rouge 8 months I wasn't too far away from soon-to-be engineers, as I lived across a dorm hallway from four of them.  I traveled across Europe with two engineers..........heck, let's just cut out the extremely long list of all-the-ways-I-know-first-hand-about-engineers nonsense and get to the real bullet-point of this paragraph - I was RAISED by an engineer and I am MARRIED to an engineer.  I am a woman who knows exactly what it means when you say that my son is a future engineer...and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

So to make myself feel better, I searched for legitimate sources that profile engineers.  Yes, yes...I know they are smart and good at math and think that they can do any other job better than the person who is currently employed doing it, but what do professional psychologists say about engineers?  Do I have a right to be concerned about my son's (apparent) future?  Let's go through the Volume of Personal Psychology's Profile of the Mechanical Engineer, Part III - Personality article point by point and dissect it, shall we?

(1) Mechanical engineers are emotionally stable. They ordinarily make compatible marriages, maintain comfortable human relations, and are usually free of neurotic and psychosomatic symptoms.

•  Fair enough.  My Dad, Patrick, and my college roommate and friend Ashley (who in an effort of full disclosure is a chemical engineer, not a mechanical) are all emotionally stable and are in stable marriages.  I *might* argue the "free of neurotic symptoms" based solely on my husband's love of spreadsheets and graphs, but it doesn't push him into being classified as unstable (yet). 

(2) Interpersonal relations are harmonious but casual. Impersonality is one of their more common traits.

• im.per.son.al.i.ty (n) -
  
  a. Showing no emotion or personality
  b. Absence or reduction of concern for other individuals' needs or desires
  c. Not responsive to or expressive of human personalities

• Or d. thinking math is cool

(3) An analytical interest in people is rare.

• But an interest in analytical chemistry is not.    

(4) They avoid introspection and self-examination. Insight is often shallow. This lack of self-understanding makes them less perceptive of social nuances and relatively insensitive to the less obvious needs of others.

• Wait, Patrick could suffer from being less perceptive of social nuances than the average human????  He might be relatively insensitive to my less obvious needs???  Stop it.  You.are.blowing.my.mind.

(5) Engineers are straightforward, direct, and self-sufficient.

•  In 41 years of marriage my mom has never had to wonder what my dad really thought of (fill-in-the-blank) or call a handy-man.  True story. 

 (6) They are inclined to be matter-of-fact and, outside their own field, are often unimaginative. Their attitudes are realistic, though their brand of realism deals more with surfaces than with depths.

• The only reason the second paragraph of this post makes a distinction between "engineer" and "future engineer" is because I re-read it in its original state of just saying "engineer" and all I could picture was my dad reading it and commenting that "Ashley was not an engineer when you lived with her because she didn't have her degree yet."  Yes Dad, you are right.  Just saying "engineer" wasn't technically correct.  And above all we must be technically correct, even in a creative writing type blog post (if this sounds bitter, it's because we have actually had a conversation about my need to be technically correct versus creative writing in my own blog.)

(7) Engineers are energetic. When faced with problems, they are advocates of the direct action approach. Polite diplomacy and oblique conciliatory tactics are foreign to their nature.

• While I prefer the Kelsey-patented "compliment sandwich" technique for negative remarks and the "I thought it was ABC instead of XYZ...but I don't know, I could be wrong..." wording for correcting someone; engineers prefer to get to the point and just tell you you're flat out wrong.  Not a negative necessarily, as a lot of people have mistaken my correcting phrase to mean, "I'm a dumb blonde, don't listen to me" instead of how it is actually meant, which is: "I can't believe you thought that, it is clearly wrong but I don't have the heart to tell you the truth...that I'm smarter than you."  Keep this in mind the next time you find me saying that to you...  (for those readers who might be bad with social nuances, I'm totally kidding!! Well at least mostly kidding... ;)

(8) Most of them are goal-oriented, serious-minded, and conscientious.

• Only my husband can seriously set a professional goal to conscientiously make a battery explode into a fireball...and not see what's so odd about doing stuff like that at work.

(9) They like phenomena to be definitely structured; there is a fundamental aversion to ambiguity. This fondness for structure and order may underline their essentially authoritarian approach.

• There are not words to adequately describe how correct this statement is.  I actually think the engineer's equivalent to the Hippocratic oath goes something like this: "I will apply structure to all areas of my life.  I will neither be ambiguous or uncertain, unless we are using the Uncertainty Principle of quantum mechanics.  I will not tell my spouse what she wants to hear based solely on the fact she wants to hear it as this is unethical and Socialist.  Whatever equations I solve, I will always fully believe that I do it as a benefit to all mankind.  If I fulfill this path and keep my word faithfully, I will retire with a pension and full benefits."

(10) Engineers have definitely masculine traits and interests.

• Could this be because the VAST majority of them ARE men??????  Let's file this in the "things that make you go 'hmmm??'" category.

(11) Social participation is normal in amount. The explanation is more a matter of conventionality and social conformity than any profound interest in people. It is not true that engineers are usually introverts. What sometimes makes them appear so is their characteristic impersonality.

• Yes, see, it's not that they're so much into self-introspection as it is that they just find everyone else uninteresting.  I would also argue that marriages between two engineers HAVE to be incredibly rare (like, never-seen-it-in-the-wild rare) and therefore I can only use my own marriage to extrapolate that this "normal amount of social participation" engineers are having is directly related to their spouse saying things like, "You know what'll be fun????  Inviting tons of people over for a dinner party!  Yay!  Let's do it!!"  There's a word for this.  It's called "forced socialization."  I think they do this with lab rats too.

So after a thorough review of the literature, I've come to the conclusion that if my little mister wants to be an engineer, I suppose I will support that career choice.  After all, there are professions that require far odder personality traits than the love of order and math...

 

Works Cited

CLAUSS, ASHLEY.  College Roommate and Understander of Kelsey Quirks.  Years of watching Adult Swim every night instead of studying: 2003-2005.

ESBER, PATRICK.  Husband and Partner in Crime.  Years of happily married bliss: 2007-present.

HARRISON, R., TOMBLEN, D. T. and JACKSON, T. A. (1955), Profile of the Mechanical Engineer III. Personality. Personnel Psychology, 8: 469–490. doi: 10.1111/j.1744-6570.1955.tb01224.x

"LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (PG)". British Board of Film Classification. 1987.  If you haven't seen the dentist scene in this movie, please click here for a funny 2 and a half minutes. 

PAULUS, KURT.  Father of the Year Winner 30 years in a row.  Years of putting up with me / keeping me on the payroll: 1983-2002, 2005-2007.