EG1471 task 1

After reading the 2 articles, I find the ability to analyze and solve a situation as the most important to engineers. In the article "The expanding world of engineers", Prof Seeram Ramakrishna has said, “In today’s world, systematic and critical thinking minds attract a premium.” This is what engineers of today are trained to be. And to understand why and how this is important to an engineer, one must first understand the problems of human and the 21st century World we are living in.

The World that we are in poses many problems as time passes, and most of it are much more challenging than that of the past. One of the challenges is sustainable development. The Earth has finite resources and with the use of these resources for development, we will be depleting the resources soon. Therefore, engineers have to come out with ways to utilize renewable resources and also ways to reverse environment degradation. It is with engineers’ systematic and critical thinking minds that makes them the savior to the World’s problems.

Despite the many problems of our World, engineers faced many other issues when coming out with solutions. As mentioned in the article “Introduction to the Grand Challenges for Engineering”, one of the issues faced is that engineers need to come out with solutions that are not only targeting a group of people but also for each individual. For example, most medical product and treatment are used for solving a particular sickness. However, every individual may react differently to the treatment received, due to the different genetic makeup of each individual. This just shows how engineers have to think extensively on just a particular problem.

Engineers are needed everywhere even in service sector, which is the driving force of many developed country. In the article “The expanding world of engineers”, it is mentioned that companies, organization and even nations need a workforce that does not fear technology but embraces and thrives on it. Here the workforce refers to engineers who have the ability to systematically analyze complex information and apply holistic approach in designing solutions.
From here, one can clearly see that the ability to analyze and solve a situation is important to the engineers of the 21st century. No longer are the days where engineers only design equipment and machine, they have now become our savior to the various problems of the World.