***Editor’s Note: The “I Became An Engineer” blog runs every Friday. To share your story email jennifer.delaosa@advantagemedia.com***
This week’s story comes to us from ECN reader David E.
After getting out of high school and entering community college, I wasn’t quite sure what my career goals were, so I just took “general education” courses while I tried to figure out my life. While I was going to school full-time, I was working part-time as a grease monkey at a local service station, doing oil changes, tune-ups, and the like. This was back before there was such a thing as self-serve gas. So, the system was work on cars, run outside to pump gas, then run back in to work on cars.
One particularly brutal winter, I came down with pneumonia, a collapsed a lung, and was hospitalized. Leaving the hospital at under a hundred pounds (at six feet tall), I had a lengthy recovery.
I needed a timing light for tune-ups, but couldn’t really afford one. However, I saw an ad for one from Heathkit while perusing a magazine. I figured I had plenty of time on my hands, and it was far less money than a pre-built one, so away I went. Heathkit things were great—fantastic instructions, troubleshooting help, and a step-by-step explanation of how everything worked. I was absolutely fascinated by how all the various parts that I’d put together with my own hands came together to make this complicated tool, and their descriptions opened my eyes up to what was possible with electronics.
That event changed my life—my next Heathkit purchase was a self-study book on basic DC electronics, and I was hooked. My college offered an electronics certificate program in addition to the two-year degree. Despite the fact that meant flushing away a number of my general ed courses, I immediately re-directed myself into the electronics curricula.
I took every electronics course enthusiastically, and continued building Heathkit test equipment. Despite the fact that today’s students have the advantages of the internet, access to Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other single-board computers (let alone smartphones/tablets), I think there is a great deal missing from not actually BUILDING one’s own equipment. I probably learned as much from my assembly of test equipment, along with the associated puttering, tweaking, and experimenting (today called “making” or “hacking”), as I did from all of the classes I ever took (RIP, Heathkit).
At the beginning of my second year in the electronics program, I was given a great opportunity to become a junior technician with Xerox—the lead test engineer at the local plant came by our class and asked the professor to point any promising recruits in his direction. I ended up working on some fascinating projects (including some that are genuinely historic), and by the time I left Xerox some five years later I was a Senior Principal Engineer.
In the thirty-plus years since then, I’ve done a wide variety of esoteric engineering, which included editing a computer journal and several books, working on spacecraft systems, advanced cryptographic integrated circuit design, medical laser systems, and some ground-breaking petroleum engineering products. My wife is a college math/engineering professor, and I sometimes help out with the school engineering club, doing what little I can to try and get that “spark” lit in someone who still hasn’t quite decided what they want to do with their life.
…and all because I needed a timing light…
Read other stories, here:
- A Note From The Editor: An Engineer’s Story
- I Became An Engineer: Despite Being Bad At Math
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Drew A Flower
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of MacGyver And Comfortable Clothes
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A Small FM Radio
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A Model Airplane Contest
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Loved LEGOs And Tinkertoys
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A Magazine Ad
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Grew Up In Kenya
- I Became An Engineer: So I Wouldn’t Have To Go To Vietnam
- I Became An Engineer: By Just Being Myself
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of Sci-Fi Novels
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A Watch
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Couldn’t Stop Tinkering
- I Became An Engineer: By Studying The Fundamentals
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A 1930s Vintage Radio
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of Microscope Modifications
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Couldn’t Be An Astronaut
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Kept Asking “Why?”
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of Christmas Lights
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of Star Trek (Specifically Montgomery Scott)
- I Became An Engineer: Because No One Was Hiring Shoe Salesmen
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of An Evil Mastermind