Open Post to Peer Reviewers

 This blog post concerns my my rough draft, and allows for peer revision.

The post production phase will consist mainly of me cutting out things I feel unnecessary, cleaning up the font, and adding a bunch of pictures and diagrams to help smoothen the read.

My major strengths include tone of writing. I feel i can adequately reach an uninterested audience to care at least a little about the subject.

My major downfall is lack of usage of quotes. I asked the wrong questions during interview, more about their experience in the field, and not any questions about the pertinence of secondary sources in the genre.

Engineering a Future for Tomorrow's Children

I had the privilege of interviewing Ali Bilgin and Tosiron Adegbija, who are both assistant professors here at the University of Arizona, who are experts in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Fields.  Ali Bilgin's expertise also extends to the BME field, or for the common plebian like myself, Biomedical Engineering - basically the lovechild of engineering and medicine.

 How do we interest a generally disinterested public about engineering?

The common person is more invested and interested in engineering than you think.  Whenever you buy a brand new iPhone, whenever you use an HP printer to print out your homework for school, hell, even when you turn your light on, you are harnessing the power of computer engineering.

Engineering is obviously loved by the people inside the field, or otherwise they (hopefully) would see themselves out.

But the better question is, how can we nourish the average man's thirst for knowledge?

How can we present it in such a way that it doesn't go in one ear and out of the other?

When UA football players wear their helmets, it's backed by a promise that it has been tested, and will do its job when put under the ringer. It's backed by the promise that engineers have tested it.

The most effective way to present the information to the common man depends ultimately upon the writer's goals. Engineers publish documents primarily for 2 reasons:

1) interest the general public

and the motive that is only apparent to people within the genre:

2) prove superiority over other publishers (not seen unless you dig into the community)

Interesting the general public is accomplished through engineering magazines, with lots of pictures and flashy displays of products we use (iPhones) and products we envy (private jets).

Proving superiority is accomplished through the infamous scientific journals, in which the publisher barrages the audience with complex, dense language that is purposely meant to confuse the reader.

When would I consider writing a scientific journal?

Easy. Scientific journals are the meat and potatoes of the industry. If you need to know a lot about a certain field of study, you would come here.

There is a ton of dense information packed into anywhere from 10 to 300+ pages, regarding any topic you would like to know about regarding electrical engineering:

1) circuits

2) programming

3) computer efficiency

4) interactions between parts

etc.. etc.. etc..!!!

Scientific journals are extremely relevant also because it the professional version of a resume.

When someone asks about what you have accomplished past grad school, you point them to what you have published, and 99 out of 100 times, it will be "what scientific journals have you been a part of?"

It's the equivalent of when the high school kid is asked, "what is your GPA?"... "what is your SAT score?"... "what extracurriculars do you participate in?"

However, not everybody is a Ph.D-level engineer trying to make a name for themselves.

When would I consider writing in an engineering magazine?

An engineering magazine is the light-hearted, more fun version of the scientific journal.

If you want to show somebody who doesn't know a lick about what engineering is, you would show them WIRED, which has a ton of interesting trinkets that would interest the average joe.

Here are the types of things that frequent engineering journals:

1) Pictures... lots of them!!!

2) Charts... statistics about what the best new gadget is

3) Quotes from famous engineers that we know about

4) Reviews from average users and "experts" about new devices

Engineering magazines are extremely helpful because it turns a general disinterest, or more likely, someone who is undecided how to feel, into the next avid supporter of DJI Phantom portable drones.