Before I understood what engineering was, a professor handed me a word to look up in a dictionary. I've been using it ever since.
A look back — long before any of the tools we argue about now.
Engineering, before I knew the word
In Korea, boys in middle school took a subject simply called "Technology," and high schools offered an elective called "Industrial Arts." Mine taught "Commerce" instead — so my entire pre-college image of engineering came down to a screwdriver, a few nails, and an AM radio kit I'd soldered together. No Lego that I can recall, but I remember playing with science kits, and blowing my allowance on Academy plastic models. The closest thing to "advanced study" was learning to read resistor values off their color bands — black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, gray, white. That was the whole of my hardware education.
I walked into a computer engineering department without ever really asking myself what engineering was. What I noticed first, honestly, was the gender ratio: about one in ten classmates was a woman, which — after six years in all-boys middle and high schools — was its own small culture shock. Having women as classmates and seniors at all felt like news.
