Jennifer Turner is an engineer for a sporting goods company. It’s her job to research new materials, improve the design of existing products, and to engineer the most efficient methods possible for manufacturing her creations.
“There’s this old saying,” Jennifer says. ” ‘Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.’ Well, it’s my job to figure out how to improve the mousetrap — or in my case, the tennis racquet.
“My job is to make the racquet cheaper. Or easier to use. Or more attractive. Or more efficient to manufacture. You get the idea: basically I try to lift the company’s tennis racquet above the competition by improving it in every way I can possibly think of.”
A day in the life of an engineer
8:00 a.m. Jennifer arrives at work. The morning’s task is to test various metal alloys by giving prototype racquets to tennis players and gathering their opinions.
“I helped research and create these different metal alloys,” Jennifer says, proudly holding up one of the prototypes. “We wanted something durable and lightweight, and we’ve come up with a few good ideas.”
8:30 a.m. Jennifer walks to the tennis courts to oversee the trials, watch for any unforeseen problems or benefits of the new materials, and gather the opinions of the tennis players who try out the racquets.
“How cool is this?” Jennifer asks. “How many offices have four indoor tennis courts on the premises? Sometimes I spend an entire work week in a lab. But then there are days like this, when I feel like I get to go on a paid field trip!”
For the next several hours, Jennifer monitors the testing process, which she designed carefully to give accurate results.
“I had to account for everything,” she says. “Right down to varying the order in which each subject tries the racquets. And providing them with a disguised version of the leading competitor’s racquet. And being very careful not to give them any information about what each racquet is made of. Of course it’s tempting to talk about it, but I can’t — it would spoil the test results. I even had to make sure that the rackets were all the same color, to avoid biasing everyone’s perception!”
Jennifer observes and records the results of her survey for the next four hours.
12:30 p.m. Lunch.
1:30 p.m. Jennifer returns to her office to gather all the questionnaire answers together. She’s been running this test all week so far, so there are hundreds of opinions to tabulate.
2:30 p.m. “Looks like we have a winner,” Jennifer says. “It’s not the alloy that I created myself, unfortunately! But it’s not the competition’s racquet that people preferred, either, which is great news.” Jennifer double-checks the test results.
3:00 p.m. Time to write up a report and a presentation on the test results. She graphs the consumer preferences and includes observations on the characteristics of the new alloy.
“Tomorrow I’ll present our findings to some of the company executives and, if I get the go-ahead, I’ll begin working on the details of manufacturing today’s winning racquet,” Jennifer says.
4:30 p.m. Time to go home.