Engineering a Well-Rounded Career

It’s easy to move about your daily life and forget the feats of engineering that get you from place to place. Consider a trip to the grocery store. You may drive a car (invented 1886) on asphalt (1870) into a metered parking spot (1938), then enter the store through automatic doors (1954) and grab a shopping cart (1984). And of course, you probably put a list on your iPhone (2007).

It took teams of engineers years of research and refinement to invent all the things we take for granted on a daily basis. Their role is firmly rooted in the problems of the real world: How can I get from A to B? How can I carry these groceries around the store? What if I could put a computer in my pocket?

“Every day is about solving a different problem,” said Will Randall ’14. “It’s easy to point to my physics and mathematics background from Colby as useful, but truly, it’s my entire liberal arts education. It plays such a big part in understanding how people think and interact. A liberal arts education broadens your horizon.”

At Colby, students interested in engineering start by looking at people problems and then add technical mastery. They may be drawn to the fundamentals, such as physics or chemistry, or follow their interests, as did civil engineer Erica Lei ’20, who double-majored in environmental studies and mathematics before earning her graduate degree at Stanford University.

Said Lei, “My Colby education has been such an advantage. I may not have done specifics on the engineering work I’m doing today, but my natural science background has helped me talk outside the numbers to clients and to project stakeholders.”

That’s the same approach that Randall took to his Colby education, adding an anthropology minor to his physics major just because it was interesting. “Coming into Colby, I was very interested in engineering as a career path, and my physics degree allowed me to understand the very basic concepts that make up engineering,” he said. “But what’s so unique about the liberal arts in general is that you get to take so many other classes. I was taking contemporary dance and every anthropology class I could fit into my schedule.”

While in graduate school at the University of Colorado Boulder, Randall found a way to bring both sides of his education together through product design. “I wasn’t sure how I could combine the hard sciences and this love of understanding people and society until I took my first product development class,” he said. “There’s such a human-centered component around any sort of product design, because you need to understand how people think, how they interact with one another, and how they interact with products around them if you want to be successful. So there’s the mechanical engineering side of it, but it’s very much people-oriented.”

Now, he’s the director of product development at STARC Systems, which builds modular, temporary, reusable walls for occupied renovations in commercial settings such as hospitals and airports. “My job is to discover what problems we’re trying to solve for our customers, and then solve them,” said Randall, who has received four patents for his work. “It’s a lot of problem solving, and I get to use my background from Colby all the time in how I think about the customer in what we do.”

Taking a people-first approach to engineering is what excites John Tortorello ’15 about going to work each day. But let’s hope the average person won’t be handling the nuclear fusion device that Tortorello, a nuclear and radiological engineer, and his team are working on.