{"id":5438,"date":"2025-04-30T18:32:56","date_gmt":"2025-04-30T18:32:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/?p=5438"},"modified":"2025-04-30T20:08:19","modified_gmt":"2025-04-30T20:08:19","slug":"from-the-editor-engineers-often-are-the-smartest-people-in-the-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/index.php\/2025\/04\/30\/from-the-editor-engineers-often-are-the-smartest-people-in-the-room\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Editor: Engineers Often Are the Smartest People in the Room"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u201cSmart Engineering\u201d special issue each year is always a challenging column for me to write.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t see the value of smart engineering\u2014it\u2019s just that I don\u2019t 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\u2019ve known.<\/p>\n

Maintain Trust<\/strong><\/p>\n

A somewhat funny, but true, definition might be: A smart engineer is one who has determined how not to do other people\u2019s work and gets other engineers to do their work. I remember when I was first learning how to delegate work\u2014it wasn\u2019t easy. It takes a certain amount of skill or knowledge to trust the work (and work ethic) of another person. (I really shouldn\u2019t include \u201cwork ethic.\u201d After all, I teach my students that our profession is based on ethics. It\u2019s in all our laws and creeds and purpose statements.)<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Wonder Workers<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve 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\u2019re good to go.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019t taking any significant risk, of course. He was a professional engineer and wouldn\u2019t complete work that wasn\u2019t in his area of expertise. Besides, he was smart.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A smart engineer on the project devised a method to temporarily support the floor system and cut the floorbeams in half along the structure\u2019s 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\u2019t only smart; the word \u201cclever\u201d comes to mind.<\/p>\n

Smart Students<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the last few years, I\u2019ve been paying attention to how \u201csmart\u201d today\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019re all smart engineers. We don\u2019t let them graduate until they prove it!)<\/p>\n

A senior in this class recently asked: \u201cWhy can\u2019t I always be an intern?\u201d At first, we all laughed, and I\u2019m confident she wasn\u2019t completely serious. The class discussed reasons why that wouldn\u2019t be a good idea: financial, having other engineers pass you by, etc. Then the student explained that, as an intern, you didn\u2019t have much in the way of responsibility, but you got to learn something every day. Probably one of the smartest things I\u2019ve heard an engineer say in a long time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The post From the Editor: Engineers Often Are the Smartest People in the Room<\/a> first appeared on Informed Infrastructure<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u201cSmart Engineering\u201d special issue each year is always a challenging column for me to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5438"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5438"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5439,"href":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5438\/revisions\/5439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}