The “Smart Engineering” special issue each year is always a challenging column for me to write. It’s not that I don’t see the value of smart engineering—it’s just that I don’t know enough about the technical details to create a few paragraphs that would be interesting to our readers. So instead, I will illustrate what I think is a smart engineer, featuring some examples of people I’ve known.
Maintain Trust
A somewhat funny, but true, definition might be: A smart engineer is one who has determined how not to do other people’s work and gets other engineers to do their work. I remember when I was first learning how to delegate work—it wasn’t easy. It takes a certain amount of skill or knowledge to trust the work (and work ethic) of another person. (I really shouldn’t include “work ethic.” After all, I teach my students that our profession is based on ethics. It’s in all our laws and creeds and purpose statements.)
I preach to everyone I can reach that engineering is a profession that, for the most part, people still trust. There are those who have always shown a bit of distrust toward lawyers, and lately there’s a rise in the distrust of the medical profession, scientists and historians. But even Congress listens when the American Society of Civil Engineers evaluates and grades our infrastructure. So, we must continue to earn and keep that trust level, and it starts with being smart about who you count on to do your work.
Wonder Workers
I’ve known some very smart engineers through the decades of my career. Some I considered smart because they learned very quickly. Show them once or give them one example, and they’re good to go.
Others I thought were smart because they were bold and confident enough to try something new. When I was manager of the Bridge Design Group, we were asked to design the first horizontally curved steel girder bridge in Indiana. I needed to find someone who would design this bridge, and I wasn’t limited to our staff. I was given authority to reach out to consultants, but I gave the first chance to our inhouse people. One of them stood up and said he would learn how to do it on his own time and then work with other engineers to get it done. I knew I wasn’t taking any significant risk, of course. He was a professional engineer and wouldn’t complete work that wasn’t in his area of expertise. Besides, he was smart.
Later in my career, my company was given a contract to completely rehabilitate the Chicago Skyway Bridge, a long-span steel truss bridge with many approach spans. The City of Chicago was preparing the structure for lease to a private firm. The rehab included the normal items: new deck, expansion joints, drainage inlets, etc. But it also included replacing the existing steel trestle-type piers with concrete piers, which was challenging enough and required many temporary supports. Even more complex was replacing the deteriorated floorbeams and other members of the deck support system, which all had to be done while maintaining two-way traffic at all times.
A smart engineer on the project devised a method to temporarily support the floor system and cut the floorbeams in half along the structure’s longitudinal centerline. My structures professor taught me that you should never alter a truss bridge while traffic was moving across it, but this engineer apparently had a different structures professor. This engineer wasn’t only smart; the word “clever” comes to mind.
Smart Students
In the last few years, I’ve been paying attention to how “smart” today’s young engineers are. My college senior civil and environmental engineering students participate in a multi-discipline, year-long design project that includes transportation, water resources, structures and environmental aspects. It’s interesting to watch how they work together on a complex project even without much experience working as part of a team. Some of them take charge, some do their part, and some have learned that second part of my first definition of smart engineer: the one who gets other engineers to do their work. (See, they’re all smart engineers. We don’t let them graduate until they prove it!)
A senior in this class recently asked: “Why can’t I always be an intern?” At first, we all laughed, and I’m confident she wasn’t completely serious. The class discussed reasons why that wouldn’t be a good idea: financial, having other engineers pass you by, etc. Then the student explained that, as an intern, you didn’t have much in the way of responsibility, but you got to learn something every day. Probably one of the smartest things I’ve heard an engineer say in a long time.
The post From the Editor: Engineers Often Are the Smartest People in the Room first appeared on Informed Infrastructure.