This article tells us that teens who have were never interested in a career in engineering are more likely to consider it after being made aware of  the cool things that engineers can do. Read the excerpt below.

"In an Intel-commissioned study of 1,000 teenagers, researchers found that around 63 percent of teens ages 13 to 18 had never considered a career in engineering.

But after hearing how much money engineers make ($75,000 annually, on average), around 60 percent of the subjects said they were more likely to consider engineering as a career. Learning that engineers suffer less during periods of high unemployment also went over well, persuading more than 50 percent of the teens in the study to look at engineering careers.

The majority of the teens in the study said they were also more interested in engineering “by understanding what engineers do, such as playing a role in rescuing the Chilean miners who were trapped in 2010, delivering clean water to poor communities in Africa, designing the protective pads worn by athletes and constructing dams and levees that keep entire cities safe,” the study’s findings read.

That’s really the most important take-away from the study: Teens become more interested in engineering simply by knowing what engineers do and what opportunities exist for engineers." 

(Read the whole article here.)

How do we market the engineering profession to kids?

Engineers in BGN - as a teenager did you always want the career you have now? What made you choose to pursue your field? Share with us. :-)

What I remember most as a kid was I would always try to fix broken things.  I loved opening things up and looking at what was inside and what made them work.  I was mostly not successful in fixing things - and my brothers hated me for doing so - but my mom would always let me do what I wanted.  That support I guess helped a lot.

So, let your kids experiment or figure-out how things worked by themselves.  If they don't seem to be curious enough to want to explore, then prod them by asking them "who can guess how the washing machine works" for example.  Am sure that will lead to some funny ideas as well.

When I was a kid, I wanted to a be a teacher just like my parents. But when I started high school I became interested in computers because I loved solving the machine problems in our class. My first thought was like, "oh this is just like Math, there's a problem and you solve it". 

Make problem solving fun for kids. Let them experience that kind of high you feel after having solved a problem. I remember someone saying that FIlipinos are fun people, so fun that they can just laugh at their problems. We should encourage kids to become problem solvers, make them realize that we don't just laugh at our problems and the right thing to do is we solve them then laugh at them.

In high school, I liked math and physics and liked the idea of the practical application of these abstract concepts. I didn't have an artistic bone in my body and always admired my friends with artistic talents who could create beautiful things. I later found creative expression in the design required in engineering (in my case, software engineering) - I didn't need to be an artist. I could come up with an elegant design - in software.