This is very much what the three Boeing engineers were trying to teach my class. Everything around us, from the cars we drive even to the shoes we wear was designed by a team of engineers doing extensive testing and designing on things that may not even pan out. To put ourselves in their position, we were given a project to create a wind turbine design capable of carrying a certain amount of weight. Even after just a day of planning, we were exhausted. Every aspect of the design had to come under intense scrutiny because a waste of materials could mean death for the entire project. It could prove frustrating for some students who just had idea after idea scrapped. However, the more failure we encountered, the more satisfying it was to reach a conclusion, a design that worked.
In the end, National Engineers Week was a very exciting time for my class and I. We got to explore our interests into the fields of engineering, we could discuss our ideas with real life engineers, and we got to work as teams to ultimately create the best piece of engineering. After all, every great engineer always has a team of people behind them to expand upon their ideas and help make them a reality. Perhaps that was the greatest lesson into engineering that we discovered, teamwork can make or break a project. Thusly, it is important to cooperate and to work well with whatever team of people you one gets, and never to let petty differences get in the way of completing the project’s goals or objectives.