Intepretation of Quote
“I contend that we (engineers) are undervalued because of our widespread
inability to explain what we do to the general public (and why it is so important).
It is one of the hardest goals to accomplish, to be able to boil down difficult
concepts into a short and easily understood presentation or elevator pitch.”
Marybeth Miceli, President, Miceli Infrastructure Consulting, USA (2011)
What i can intepret from this quote is that despite engineers contributing argubaly the most in terms of human innovation, they are unable to condense the information to the general public in a way they can fathom the magnitude of their efforts. To relate this better, i would use an analogy of an adult trying to teach a complex game simple enough so that a child understands it. In this way, one can easily relate to how much of a struggle it is to explain terms and principles of engineering to one that has no prior knowledge in it, in this case our audience being the general public. In conclusion, i would like to emphasise my sympathy with the chosen quote by relating to another quote by Joseph Joubert, who says "To teach is to learn twice".
I do very much agree to the interpretation made, us engineers are very technical based, in a way that our language used on a daily basis may not be able to sufficiently describe what/how we do certain things in this industry. Because a technical process is so complex, breaking it down to simpler yet descriptive words for our audience to learn and understand is a constant struggle for us engineers.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you Deivesh, it is definitely not easy to convey what we do to the general public due to how specialised we are in our own field, it is not easy to break down what we do either because there is a system on why we do things and it's hard to explain it to someone with no background of engineering.
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