History of Engineering (HST318)

For my second multidisciplinary competency required I enrolled in The History of Engineering. This course not only taught me about how different civilizations utilized engineering for their advancements but rather how the engineering process itself is something to take pride in. Unlike pure science, engineering isn't about being perfect or having a complete solution but rather doing the best you can given the constraints or limitations of the problem. By learning about how engineering methods impaced how the world was built, it gave me a better understanding of the human motivation behind the subject and made me a more well rounded individual by understanding the individual impact of it.

In this course, I learned about different time periods and the engineering methods used in them. This ranged from medieval castles, to the instustrial revolution,  modern cities, and futuristic infrastructure. Throughout these, different methods from the trial and error process, to innovating a fail case and backwards engineering, or even marvels of architecture were all emphasized. 

This connects to my theme of Joy of Living since this course focused on the intersection of both human and engineering mindsets. Humans on one hand have a sense of creativity while physics relies on laws. Engineering is the intersection of those two fields and forces us to really think about our humanity. In Joy of Living this is very important, because our stakeholders and customers will often try to communicate with engineers on the human level and being able to translate their requests to the technical aspect is quite important.