Hardware Engineers Who Design Tomorrow

Everyone has a personal story about the things that brought them into hardware engineering. Mine stems from a desire to work on designing new technology to make people’s lives better. Designing new technologies can have ripple effects that you could never predict. What is your dream project?

Learning to drive is one of the greatest experiences of my life. I grew up a couple miles from the Pacific Ocean in Southern California and remember driving along the coast with the windows down feeling the breeze and experiencing the sunset. When I was younger the possibilities seemed endless, jumping into a car and being able to transport myself countless miles easily and quickly. I thought driving was the best thing anyone could learn to do. When my mother required eye surgery, they warned she may not be able to get a license again if the surgery didn’t go correctly. It had never occurred to me that one day I might not be able to drive. What would life be like without a transportation system that had become ingrained into my way of life? I had come to accept not being able to drive one day as an inevitability of life.

My mother’s surgery went well and my mother is still driving around just fine, but the advent of self-driving cars has refreshed the memory in my mind. The application of the technology could benefit humanity greatly. Can you imagine a future where you never have to wait in traffic again? A future where you never have to drive yourself again. A future where everyone has a convenient method of transportation. Some of the many benefits of self-driving cars include:

• Enhanced safety. With self-driving technology distraction-free driving can finally become a reality, decreasing the number of human-caused fatalities and collisions.
• Increased efficiency. With more self-driving cars on the road and automated traffic control, the congestion nightmares known in today’s cities can be significantly reduced.
• Quality comfort. With autonomous technology at the wheel, we’d have more opportunities to engage in activities we love while traveling to our destination.
• Greater Accessibility. Mobility for disabled or vision-impaired individuals would cease to be a barrier, allowing these individuals to freely travel and explore.

A lot of people don’t realize how many electronics are found in automobiles. I became an electrical engineer to create technology to bring people some of the happiness that technology has brought me from my first computer to my first car. The possibilities opened for me seemed infinite. You never know what you might discover when you put your passion into your work. Just think of Nikola Tesla and how his work continues to be relevant to our society and technological progression.

Striving to innovate and solve the problems that plague society is what engineers do. Engineers work to make inevitabilities into rarities and the impossible into possible. Whether you are working on the next big thing or your dream project, you are creating what you love and transforming ideas into reality. Take a look at why some of others became Hardware Engineers.