Indeed, the explosion of the number of electrical engineering jobs and the subfields that specify them is proof of the world’s continued technological advancement. But what exactly do these engineers do? At the mention of “electrical”, or any word related to it, some of us immediately jump to mental images of wires and power outlets. There’s more to it than that, however. Apparently, being an electrical engineer can put you around expensive toys of science that almost none of us regular people would know how to turn on, let alone operate. Listed below are some of the reasons why electrical engineers are the equivalent of rock stars in the scientific field.
- No industrialized city exists nowadays without a power grid, an electrical network of generators connected together to manufacture the energy needed by their users. Power engineers, as they are called, work on its intricate design and maintenance. If the knowledge needed to make something like that work does not give you bragging rights, then the job title alone should. In the future, satellite controlled power systems will be created, giving us the ability to do something about power surges or blackouts before they cause any further inconvenience.
- Those scientists you see on television shows and movies that create these absolutely small machines called nanobots may look a tad too ridiculous to be real. Some of us might think that no technology today would be able to create a robot the way we understand those machines to be–able to perform a specific function upon command and operated by an energy source. And because we are all not scientists, some of us do not know that this already exists, albeit still in the developing process. The RoboBee or RoboFly took 12 years to make. Electrical engineers are all too familiar with microelectronics, the same field that gave birth to this invention. We can only imagine robot soldiers the size of a pinhead battling cancer cells in the future.
- What do household security systems and a personal jet plane have in common? If you answered they’re probably owned by people who have too much money, then you wouldn’t be wrong. There’s one thing more, however–they both have a mechanism designed by instrumentation engineers. The mercury switch that enables the furnace to maintain a specific temperature and all the bells and whistles that keep aircrafts from getting lost and maintaining altitude are part of instrumentation engineering. This subfield is where sensors are developed for larger electrical systems, meaning that a Boeing 747 won’t probably last an hour in the skies without the proper sensors, if it takes off at all, of course. If you were one of those children who had been obsessed with making sure their paper planes remained aloft, you might want to look into this.
