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What actually is engineering? Unlike medicine, law or accountancy, engineering is easily the least understood. There are no popular culture depicting the work of engineers while there are sitcoms and movies made for mathematicians, scientists, and technology pioneers. In fact, of the STEM disciplines, there are some mainstream circulations that E stands for Economics. It is easy to explain that lawyers argue about the past, doctors heal the present and engineers builds the future.

While a gross simplification, the first two are easy to comprehend as everyone have agreements and disagreements and all of us have illness and ailments. Most of us are terrible at reading crystal balls and the future, we are even less proficient in explaining the little that we see. Similarly, it is easy to explain and to understand that science is the idea of how things work, technologies are the tools that make things easier to do and mathematics is the language where we express these thoughts and ideas as everyone uses these to a certain extent. Engineering, on the other hand, is not that simple to explain. T

he enigma of what is engineering, is so prevalent, that a good portion of engineers themselves cannot articulate what exactly engineering is. With the advancement of technology and philosophy, the lines between the extended family of engineering have been blurred. Project managers, engineers, technicians, technologists, and many other aspects of engineering has now evolved beyond recognition and that roles and responsibilities while comprehensive in name may be absent in execution. Gone are the days that the roman engineers stood beneath an arch when the scaffoldings are removed.
 
In some instances, engineers have become glorified drafters, while in others, code compliance checkbox agent. While these are certainly aspects of engineering, this in the humble opinion of the author is not engineering and therefore this essay is an open letter to ask the profession what is engineering, how do we envision engineering to be and where do we want the profession to go. It is a love letter, the curiosity of what we are and who we can become, that our profession is inherently vast, and it is unique; along with technology; in which our innovations often lead to our own obsolescence.