Engineers and the Media

This is going to be my first blog post ever and I pretty much failed English class, so bear with me.

Now the other day in one of those tutorials, I had to opportunity to ask Jason Foster a question about our portfolios. In the conversation, he mentioned something about the lack of engineers in today’s media. What he said was true, I couldn’t think of a show with an engineer as a major character off the top of my head. Most of the important characters were more of a scientist then an engineer.

I have to admit, I never even wanted to be an engineer when I was small; I was leaning towards being a scientist after watching loads of Bill Nye the Science Guy or The Magic School Bus. I thought that I might just be the odd man out, but after doing a quick Workopolis search on what children aged 5-19 want to be when they grow up, the categories were along the lines of police officer/firefighter, athlete, doctor, teacher, or musician [1]. The word “engineer” never even came up. Why?

The question led me to think of one of the slides that were shown in a Praxis lecture about how engineers are portrayed as people in plaid shirts and glasses holding a clipboard in a car commercial. The problem here is obvious, engineers are not stylish. Sure, we have a hardhat, but so do construction workers. Scientists, doctors, firefighters, police officers, athletes; all of these professions have cool outfits from lab coats to uniforms. Any reasonable 10 year old would prefer to wear a lab coat holding vials of reactive chemicals instead of carrying a clipboard and doing math. Where do these stereotypes come from? The TV, of course.

A quick Google search on “engineer” and “scientist” shows the stereotype. Seriously, what job looks more hardcore here?

Now of course choosing a profession based on what they look like is quite shallow and stupid, but that is not what a producer of a movie/TV series would care about. How would a sci-fi show fit into the storyline a subplot about how much money the engineer saved in building that warp drive through some optimization technique among subplots of alien infestations? Clearly, the scientists analyzing the dead alien would get more screen time, they are just cooler.

So basically, if engineers want some time on the screen, they need to make whatever they do look cool. Even though I couldn’t come up with “cool” engineers off the top of my head, Google was able to give a few pointers:


The engineers working for Dell sure knows where it’s at. They take away the dirty, greasy, and loud environments that engineers are usually portrayed as working in.

Crazy engineer from the anime movie Steamboy that is comparable in coolness to that of a mad scientist.

So then Foster brought up an interesting point; do engineers want to be portrayed the way scientists are? Or should an engineer be someone who hides in the background and keeps civilized life possible while the general population go wondering about?

In my opinion, engineers are where they are supposed to be. The general population should have some knowledge about how things work, like how electricity flows through wires in a computer. However, engineers go deeper than that, to the point where we must not only understand the science, but be able to use it to build or rebuild things we take for granted. Engineers do not need to know the details of fashion design, or landscaping, or how to paint walls, so why should a fashion designer, landscaper, or painter know the intricacies of engineering?

Having science in the limelight instead of engineering allows for people to get a broad understanding of scientific concepts without having to wade through the details, which I think would make science be better accepted by society.

[1] http://www.workopolis.com/work.aspx?action=Transfer&View=Content/Common/AboutUs/NewsReleasesView&lang=EN&file=News20070828