Whether you are thinking about what degree to study or if you are in engineering you have to ask. Do I meet the requirements to be an engineer?

If you are reading this, it is probably because you are going to start soon, or you plan to do an engineering career. If on the other hand you are already an engineer or you are in the race, the conditions that I am going to deal with in this article will be familiar to you, since you had to fulfill most, or even all, to get where you are or advance in the event that still be a student.

Surely you will associate engineering careers with people with a high IQ and an intelligence superior to the rest. Logically these parameters will influence the development of the race, but are not much less determinant to carry it out.

Engineer

However, there are other conditions that you have to meet yes or yes to be able to go ahead and become an engineer:

1. Curiosity

First and foremost, be curious: want to know how everything works, what it’s made of, why it behaves that way and not another, why if I do this it responds in that way, what makes it possible, how can I improve it . These questions haunt the future engineer since he has the use of reason. Without knowing very well why, the power engineer disassembles every junk he finds, he wants to know what makes the whole, he wants to be able to separate each piece of gear and reassemble it and work. He wants to know everything. If you do not fit into this profile, it is likely that you end up frustrating while studying and do not finish the race. Of course, if you come for the money and social status that goes hand in hand with engineering, you can go.

2. Sacrifice

Enter an engineering, unless you have a very superior intelligence (I remember that intelligence is not measured by the score, nor by the average of high school), is to take you out of life until you finish it. If you are a normal person, probably take more than four years to finish the race and most of your days are studying early, classes, continue studying and sleep, eat in record times and sleep just right. If you are willing for that to be so for four, five or more years, go ahead. If not, you’ve made a mistake in the race.

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3. Constance

Curiosity is useless if we only ask ourselves questions. To know the answer to these sometimes difficult questions, it is necessary to have, first, a good foundation of mathematics, physics and computer science. To get to have that base, several years of preparation are necessary. If we intend to understand the world around us and be able to improve it, we will need to be very constant and, once acquired, we can move on to study the problems of real life, without idealizations or assumptions. Outside the books, the problems are more complicated: we must take into account all the factors that influence and know when they are negligible and when they are not. The world is hard to understand, but that’s what engineers are for.

4. Organization

At the same time that constants, we have to be organized to plan the work. It is of little use to study a subject all day, for example. We must have a specific schedule and be able to fulfill it. Otherwise, we will fail. We have to distribute our time well, although sometimes we miss hours in the day. Although it may not seem like it, the organization is one of the most important keys when it comes to studying a career of such caliber, since you probably will not be able to cover everything you have to do. Focus, simplify, divide and, little by little, you will win. No need to remember that here is not worth studying a couple of days before, right?

5. Psychology

The psychological profile of the potential engineer is very specific. The engineering student needs to be a strong-minded person, who does not scare the least at any time and before any problem. In most exams (and, of course, in real life) you will always find questions that you will not know or how to approach. The engineer uses his wit to solve whatever it is, even if you do not know: adjust, approximate and suppose so that everything fits together, gives a convincing result and reasonably fits the reality. You must also be able to not break down under any circumstances. Surely you will fail miserably several times despite how well you have prepared the exam, the hours that you have thrown and despite having left other subjects to prepare well this. For that reason, it is necessary to endure those hard blows again and again without decaying the least. What’s more, you need to come to the top the more the more disappointed you are with yourself.

With all this, the five keys are revealed that, in my opinion, are the main ones to be able to advance satisfactorily in the career and reach your desired goal: to be an engineer. In fact, I dare to think that if you complete the first you will be able to fulfill the others almost without thinking. Think very well, if you are hesitant, if you are really willing to go through situations similar to those described and if you are really willing to invest so much of your life in something that maybe you do not love it. And I tell you from now: you have to feel a true passion for engineering to support the long road and the great obstacles that lead you to become an engineer.