How do you know if engineering is right for you?

Get some balsa wood and build a bridge. Set a heavy weight on the bridge. If it collapses think of another field of study.

There are many types of engineering. Could you be more specific?

Love of math.

@jerv Mechanical, electrical, or civil engineering.

You might want to be an engineer if you don’t have enough charisma to become an undertaker.

What type of interests should I absolutely have in order to study engineering?

None, though curiosity how physical/electrical/natural things work is pretty common. Engineers “fix things until they break”. Did you “break” things a lot when you were a kid? Were you the kid who always “pushed the buttons” in the store to see what would happen? Most engineers have basically the same interests as the average Joe: Sports, cars, music, chicks, movies, personal finance, etc.

Are there any natural skills I should possess?

It seems some people are “math averse”; you don’t want to be one of those people.

I am an engineer and proud of it. I like being able to figure things out. I don’t love math but I can and do use it. It is a tool.
I love the challenge of making something that has never been made before.

Look around you right now. Everything you see was designed by engineers, as was the equipment to make and deliver it to you. Even the materials were selected by or designed by engineers.
Every factory that opens, every building constructed, every product made, every road built, needs engineers.

Few careers (if any) have that many openings. Good luck to you.
By the way, I’ve been told engineers make the best husbands. They fix everything.

@LuckyGuy I’d probably be a bad wife then, if I became an engineer. My husband might feel unneeded.
What kind of engineer are you?

My son is close to getting his mechanical engineering degree. This field of study has been a perfect fit for him, so I’m just going to comment on what I saw in him as he grew up that foreshadowed this affinity. Maybe you’ll relate to some of it.

He has an extraordinary ability to visualize, by which I mean that he can “build” mechanisms in his head, observe how they work, and anticipate problems.

When he encountered mechanisms in his environment, he could quickly intuit the principles involved, kind of “channeling” the mind of the designer of the mechanism.

He loved to imagine other ways that a function might be accomplished.

I once took him to a museum of the history of technology in Paris. He saw a mechanical calculator designed by Blaise Pascal in the 1600s. For days afterwards, he basically sleepwalked through Paris; he was lost in thought, building a mechanical calculator in his head. This was an entirely useless exercise, of course, because no one would ever need a mechanical calculator. But this was pure recreation for him. He did it for fun. Sometime later that week, he told me that he had figured out everything but the division function, and that’s the last I heard of it.

Math was never a passion for him, but he is quite competent at it.

@Aesthetic_Mess Are you kidding me? You’d make a great wife. There’s nothing hotter than an engineer with benefits.

I got my undergrad degree in engineering science and my graduate degree in mechanical engineering. I also had a very strong background in physics and electrical. Right out of school I started working with microprocessors (when they were new) and consider myself a systems guy.
Give me a lever and an Arduino and I can move the world with the flip of a switch.

I was an electrician in the Navy and am now a machinist. Between those jobs and my hobbies, I have learned a lot about engineering, but I get one thing that engineers really don’t; the pride of actually building shit myself. Also, while various forms of engineering knowledge are essential for what I do, true engineers seem to be theoretical, often overlooking the practical implications of their plans. And when what they want is either not cost-effective or just flat out impossible, I engineer solutions that work on time and under budget.

So, do you want to design or build? I prefer to build, but that is just me.

Do you like grid paper and mechanical pencils?

@phaedryx These days, it’s more about CAD ;)

Engineers are good at sequential reasoning and able to hold the steps towards a solution in their head.

This might sound a bit simplistic, but this is from a psych class. Give him a piece of paper and have him, as fast as possible, write as many emotion words as he can think of. If it’s organized, sequential, neat and categorized, he just might be a good engineer. If it’s jumbled and nonlinear, direct him to an art school :)

Are there seemingly menial things one is interested in that help with engineering?

Too many to list. For instance, chopping ingredients in the kitchen involves a few engineering principles. A sharp knife exerts more pressure for the same amount of force than a dull one; Pressure = ( Force / Area ). And the size of the pieces you cut affects how it cooks (thickness affects heat transfer) and tastes (smaller pieces have more surface area compared to their volume).

Engineering is all about taking basic principles and applying them. You probably already know many principles but don’t realize how much they really apply to normal, everyday things. What sets engineers apart is noticing when/where those principles come into play, understanding the details, and being able to use that understanding in other applications. It’s not enough to just know what an engineer knows; you also have to think how an engineer thinks.

My friend is just ok at math. He’s an engineering major at SDSU. He loves computers however. So he’s studying to be a computer engineer. It’s hard to visualize engineering as an art for most people, but then you realize it really is just applied mathematics with sculpture and manipulation which is an art form after all.