The Formation of an Engineer

My daughter has been taking Ballet classes for a while now.  A year ago, she got to be a little angel in her ballet school's performance of The Nutcracker.  One of the neatest things that I get to experience as the father of a ballerina is the grace and panache with which she can move from the hallway, through the kitchen and into the living room.  Even better, she *never* knocks things off of the countertop as her arms twirl through the air.

The engineering corollary is how engineers move through the puzzles of engineering.  Just as a piroette is the result of strengthening and practice with careful attention to detail, engineering is the result of plying years of experience to exercise the mental gymnastics associated with understanding the problem, devising a solution, and describing it in whatever context it needs to be described.

In the case of the software engineer, the problems are as varied as there are engineering disciplines.  My personal focus has been software simulations and control systems, which means I have physics, math, simulation, data processing, and hardware/software interaction as part of my software engineering dance moves.  Part of the reason I wanted to get into this particular kind of engineering is that it forces the fusion of all of those otherwise disparate disciplines, and I wanted to keep growing as an engineer.

Watching my daughter, when she dances, it strikes me that she is cognizant of each finger, each toe, both arms, both legs, head posture, tummy tuck and things that I don't even think about.  The discipline that goes with being able to gracefully move through life isn't achieved by accident.  It is achieved through many repetitions and hard work.

The way an engineer moves through life is the result of their engineering training.  The way a computer scientist moves through computers is a flurry of keystrokes, and my fingers are as nimble as my daughter's feet.  I hope that the software I write has the elegance of a ballerina doing a pirouette.

The thought behind Montessori Computers is the same as the slow pliers and tantus of ballet 1.  Not everyone who takes ballet classes becomes a professional ballerina, but none who go through ballet classes come out clumsy.