***Editor’s Note: The “I Became an Engineer” blog runs every Friday. To share your story email jennifer.delaosa@advantagebizmarketing.com***
This week’s story comes to us from ECN reader Sudipto Bose, general manager, automotive and time domain solutions, Tektronix.
Growing up in a small town in India, I always knew I’d become an engineer. The same way you support a certain sports team: you don’t decide, you just know.
This was probably due to my father who was a chemical engineer. He would say, “This is the school you’ll go to, this is the degree you’ll get, this is the company you’ll work for.”
And luckily, it all made sense to me. I liked math. I liked physics. I liked analytics. And I liked being able to take all those skills and use them to create something. I’m the first to admit there was just a little pressure at play too.
When I look back now, I don’t know if it was my love of math or fear of my dad that made me an engineer. Perhaps both helped.
When I was fifteen, I decided to take my key chain apart. It had six buttons, each with a different sound. For my classmates and me, the best (and most irritating) sound was, of course, the ambulance siren. We’d wait until a serious, silent moment in a lesson and suddenly set it off—our favorite prank.
Anyway, we liked this noise, but we had a problem: it wasn’t loud enough for us. It was a little annoying, sure, but we were aiming for ultimate irritation. We wanted window-shaking levels of noise.
So, I started tinkering. I converted the battery system to run from the wall socket. I changed the voltage, rerouted the wires, flicked the switch and—yep, it blew up in my face. Maybe that was karma.
After that, I set off a few more explosions before deciding to settle on a safer area of engineering: microelectronics. Things still blow up, and okay, that can get expensive—but you’re not likely to start any fires (which is probably a good thing, considering my track record).
Most engineers have a “when I blew this up” story. It’s par for the course when you’re trying to create something new. And that skill—creating something new—is part of what has always drawn me to engineering. You get to combine these really rational disciplines (analytics, math, physics) with this ability to solve problems—even bigger problems than “this annoying noise isn’t annoying enough.”
Problem solving is a big part of what I have done throughout my career as a semiconductor engineer and now as general manager for automotive and time domain solutions at Tektronix.
That’s why I admire Elon Musk. He’s solving problems too, but tomorrow’s problems—like space travel. At Tektronix, we work in a similar way: just look at what we’re doing in automotive power, which is the area I lead. We’re already planning how to get ahead, not just for the next seven years, but the next seventy.
We’re solving tomorrow’s problems too (and only very occasionally blowing things up).
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 Of MacGyver And Comfortable Clothes
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A Model Airplane Contest
- I Became An Engineer: So I Wouldn’t Have To Go To Vietnam
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of Sci-Fi Novels
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A Watch
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A 1930s Vintage Radio
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Kept Asking “Why?”
- I Became An Engineer: By Studying The Fundamentals
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of Microscope Modifications
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Drew A Flower
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A Paperback Book On Electricity
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Wanted To Travel
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Tinkered With A Radio
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of Math, Science, And Serendipity
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Loved Discovery And Fixing Things
- I Became an Engineer: Because It Was Hot That Day
- I Became an Engineer: Because of Viktor Frankl and Existentialism
- I Became an Engineer: By Turning Curiosity into a Career
- I Became an Engineer: Because of the Air Force Technical Applications Center
- I Became an Engineer: Because I Went to Work with My Dad