Straight from the heart of an Engineer

Don’t run after success, run after excellence and success will come to you.

Baba Ranchod Das

Firstly, to be brutally honest I seriously didn’t know that today was Engineering day till I reached my workplace – VAYUZ. 4 years of engineering well spent in India’s leading University, yet oblivious to the implication of the date and the day. Seriously “Engineering Day”, we celebrate that in India??? I am sure many of my fellow engineers would probably share the same sentiment. As I settled down on my workstation, our Cofounder Pooja walked up to me and greeted me “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star!! Happy Engineer’s day to you” and I looked back at her completely dumbstruck. Ok, what?? She continued, since you are an Engineer and a newbee at VAYUZ why don’t you do a write up on the importance of Engineers Day? I was further suggested to take few bytes from fellow engineers on the floor, phew!! Now this was toughest ask, I was like wondering how the heck am I going to get these #engineers to give bytes in words and not in lines of code, not to forget I am a FUCHHAA (Fresher) on the floor. Just to add when it comes to talking the community of Engineers suck at that most of the time, we are more informal type of people (Don’t procrastinate me for admitting the truth).

While I was on the job, I could see the other Cofounder in not so happy mood and I was like “Ok, if I mess up this blog then I will surely never forget this day”. So another newbee @ VAYUZ but an industry veteran was aligned to help me with this task. So the first thing on my list was to figure out why do we celebrate 15th September as Engineers Day?

Here’s what I found on wiki:

The Engineering Community across India is celebrating Engineers Day on 15th September every year as a remarkable tribute to the greatest Indian Engineer Bharat Ratna Visvesvaraya. He is held in high regard as a pre-eminent engineer of India.

Second task, meaning of the word Engineer, so I went to google and typed this in my search and this is what I got as a result.

Engineer /ɛndʒɪˈnɪə/

a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or structures.

And to get more info, I dug into wiki again to find the following definition:

Engineers design materials, structures, and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, regulation, safety, and cost. The word engineer is derived from the Latin words ingeniare (“to contrive, devise”) and ingenium(“cleverness”).

You can find more details here.

So mapping the definition to my journey till date, here’s the basic checklist as per the online lexicon.

• Design: Yes, I’ve designed many a concepts.

• Build: Hmm, a bit confused on this one. I have built numerous mini projects to get those grades and GPAs. So I guess yes!!

• Maintain: Now this point made me feel that I should put a no against the above two points as well. During my college days, projects done by me were for the grades and grades only. This meant they could never be tested, validated or certified real time. So the point of maintaining became not applicable in my case.. A “No” here meant that even the aforementioned “2 Yes” didn’t have any importance since all 3 points were inter-connected.

So in a nutshell, as per the online lexicon after 4 years of BTECH program I’m still not an Engineer. Now that’s a rude shock.

Moving on to my next task, I went back to google to search number of engineers produced in India. The number is staggering, 1.5 million and if you add up indian students who are studying abroad it will definitely cross 2 million.

Decided to look up more details about the employment figures and then came the real shocker

Over 80% of engineers passing out are unemployable. No wonder cracking a placement drive was like spotting a tiger in Jim Corbett.

Wow a simple greeting in the morning turned out to be a day of introspection and realization, 4 years of hard earned degree suddenly seemed not so hard fought. Yeah I am proud to be called an Engineer but suddenly the responsibility of being one dawned on me. The open item on my checklist suddenly made sense, would I get to design, build and maintain a machine now? Degree is done, internship is on, with a date in the calendar earmarked as Engineers Day, it’s my responsibility to take that tag very seriously. Ok, we don’t have to be that serious, just that an educational degree needs to be validated with practical implementation. Next year, when I celebrate this day again I am sure those 3 skill sets will definitely have a tick against them.

Well so this experience became the blog and I ended up titling it “straight from the heart of an Engineer”.

To conclude, a quote from Baba Ranchoddas

“Don’t run after success, run after excellence and success will come to you”.

So let’s engineer the growth of this nation by designing, building and maintaining products or solutions which can solve perennial issues existing in our country. An ethos, which is also the motto of VAYUZ (need to keep my cofounders happy too). 🙂

Signing off

An Engineer for life – Jai Hind