Colleges generally want to know why you want to study the subjects you are interested in. Both what drew your interests initially, and what grand goals you have with them. Colleges want to admit the next generation of great thinkers and writers, inventors and Nobel Prize winners; and to do this, they want to see what your aspirations are.
This is easier for some fields than others; majoring in public policy because you want to enter public service and help others is a clean and simple narrative. For engineering, however, it can be more challenging to position your candidacy in this way. In this article, we’re going to explore some ways you can do so, and how you can make your interest in engineering into something grander.
Why Do You Want to Study Engineering?
The first step is to determine why you actually want to study engineering in the first place. Maybe you like the joy of creation. Maybe you want to work at NASA. Maybe you just want a job that is both challenging and high-paying. These are all reasonable options for you, but colleges tend to want something deeper.
You should not lie about your own motivations of course, but you should couch them in reasonable terms, so you come across in the best possible light. We recommend never mentioning salaries, your parent’s wishes, or specific companies when talking about your motivations for or future plans in engineering.
As you consider your motivations, both current and future, you may realize you have more than one, or that you’ve not thought in detail about your future plans. This is completely fine; high school students shouldn’t need to have every aspect of their life mapped out. In the next section, we’ll cover some potential grand motivations to position your engineering candidacy, and explain your interest in the field.
Grand Engineering Challenges and You
The National Academy of Engineering has proposed fourteen grand engineering challenges for the 21st century. You can find a full list of these here; the general thesis, however, is that engineering has long striven to make life better for people, and has made great strides in improving the quality of life for millions of people. These are the challenges that current technologists see engineers needing to tackle over the coming century. Things that the students of today may well find themselves addressing.
These challenges are incredibly broad and tend to be open-ended. These are not product ideas or even defined projects, but grand goals within engineering as a discipline. Thus they are excellent for students looking for a grand ambition to get into engineering, or who are uncertain how to otherwise position their engineering candidacy.
What is Positioning?
First, a brief aside to explain what we mean by “positioning.” The activities you do, the classes you take, and your stated extracurriculars position you in the mind of admissions officers, especially if there is synchronicity between them. For example, a student who takes classes in coding and robotics, competes in and wins robotics competitions, and who writes essays about their love of automated systems is well positioned for a program which specializes in robotics.
Positioning yourself well through your activities and goals can help you stand out from the vast sea of applicants who all want to study the same discipline, and who likely have similar preparations and experiences.
How to Position Yourself With Grand Engineering Challenges
This works best for younger students, but can be done even if you are applying right now. The first step, of course, is to read all fourteen of the challenges, and see which speak to you. Not all of them will; they cover a broad range of fields and disciplines within engineering, and some will be far outside your range of expertise and interests.
Some however, will pose questions you find interesting, or may have never considered before. Questions about how engineering will impact life; tomorrow, ten years from now, and in the next century. These are broad questions of course, just a starting point, but that’s part of the point.
Once you have picked one, start thinking about what specifically interests you about the question, and which aspects you would want to work on. As an example, we’ll look at one question in detail, to see how a student may engage with it. For this, we’ll use #7: restore and improve urban architecture.
We are an incredibly urbanized society, with most of our population living in ever bigger cities. These cities then face a significant number of challenges; of course you can’t solve them all yourself, so begin looking into them, and see which appeal to you, and how you might solve them using different engineering methods.
We’ll take air pollution as an example. There are multiple possible approaches. Perhaps you can create more efficient filtering methods for industry, to prevent pollution from entering the atmosphere in the first place. Perhaps you can design electrified transportation methods, to reduce the pollution from cars and buses. Perhaps you can work to redesign urban areas to reduce the amount of personal transit needed entirely. Perhaps you can find a way to introduce more greenery to an urban area, to naturally filter pollutants out of the air.
Each of these then requires mastery of a different field of engineering, and offers diverse options to approach. This by picking an interesting question you want to investigate and answer, you suddenly have access to a whole list of things you need to look into. You can find clubs, competitions and activities directly or tangentially related to these, and in so doing determine if this is something you want to pursue in the long term.
Once it comes time to apply, you have a ready-made narrative to tell admissions officers. You saw the challenges facing the future; and one caught your eye. When investigating it, you fell in love with the processes you found and saw along the way, leading you to want to study one field of engineering in more detail, to give you the tools you need to approach these problems at the highest level.
| Challenge | Sample Disciplines |
| Advance Personalized Learning | Computer engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering |
| Make Solar Energy Economical | Electrical engineering, materials engineering, civil engineering, environmental engineering |
| Enhance Virtual Reality | Computer engineering, biomedical engineering |
| Reverse-Engineer the Brain | Biomedical engineering, computer engineering, molecular engineering |
| Engineer Better Medicines | Biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, molecular engineering |
| Advance Health Informatics | Biomedical engineering, computer engineering |
| Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure | Civil engineering, environmental engineering, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, materials engineering, chemical engineering |
| Secure Cyberspace | Computer engineering, electrical engineering, industrial engineering |
| Provide Access to Clean Water | Civil engineering, environmental engineering, materials engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering |
| Provide Energy from Fusion | Nuclear engineering, materials engineering, civil engineering |
| Prevent Nuclear Terror | Nuclear engineering, civil engineering, materials engineering |
| Manage the Nitrogen Cycle | Chemical engineering, environmental engineering, molecular engineering, industrial engineering |
| Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods | Environmental engineering, industrial engineering, materials engineering, chemical engineering |
| Engineer the Tools of Scientific Discovery | Aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, materials engineering, molecular engineering, electrical engineering |
What if you’re already applying?
Of course, this is slightly more difficult if you’ve already reached the point of applying to colleges. In this case, it’s slightly too late to go back and change your extracurriculars, or work in a few new ones. In these cases, we do have a trick: back formation.
First, go back over your activities list, and look at what you’ve done. Pick out threads and patterns, and try to construct a narrative based on them. This can (but certainly does not have to) relate to one of the challenges; instead the goal is to form a unifying narrative in your experiences, to help form the story of why you want to study engineering.
In doing this, you may find it quite useful to draw from the challenges, to discuss the kinds of issues you would like to address with your engineering degree, or what you hope to accomplish in the future through your studies. You do not need to do this of course, but this kind of grand structure can be helpful when organizing your thoughts, and deciding on what kind of story you want to tell admissions officers.
Final Thoughts
Engineering is a discipline about creation, making something new to impact the world around you. This is an incredible thing, and colleges want to know what you’re going to do with that. They seek to understand the story of you, the story you tell to explain who you are, and who you want to be.
We hope this article has explained how to tell this kind of story, and how to let admissions officers know what you value within engineering, and how you will use the knowledge they provide to tackle the major issues of tomorrow. Of course, writing all of this in an essay and coherently exploring your ideas can be a challenge itself. If you are looking for help finding the perfect engineering opportunities for you, or writing essays explaining your story in engineering, schedule a free consultation with us today. We have helped a great many students tell their own stories, and become the people they’ve always wanted to be.
