My Experience At Pioneer Middle School

Part One: Mechanical engineering has always been one of those, “I could do that when I’m older.” kind of occupations, but I didn’t really become interested until my eighth grade year at Pioneer Middle School. It is only after I took a few classes with a math teacher named Mr. Hollingsworth that I became interested in mechanical engineering. My experience with Mr. Hollingsworth started when I took Problem Solving in the seventh grade, which is an amazing class that entailed building balloon powered cars, foam gliders, and the like. He taught us about trial and error, and how we can test, fail, learn, and adapt how we design solutions. Mr. Hollingsworth later offered another Problem Solving class for the eighth graders and I also took that class.

My enjoyment of problem solving, along with the influence of Mr. Hollingsworth, led to me getting involved in engineering. I continued STEM throughout my educational experience and I also learned that a lot of my family is also involved in engineering. I continued to expand my knowledge, and learned about the engineering process, education requirements, daily schedules, and many of the different types of engineering. My family’s questions soon turned from, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” to, “Where do you want to go to college?” I began to wonder myself too, which led to me beginning to research. Many other questions spawned from those two questions alone. What kind of career are am I looking for? What degree will I go for? Will I try to commute to college, or get an apartment/dorm? All these questions swirled around in my head, as I began

The engineering occupations all seemed to receive similar incomes, at least at first. As I dug deeper I realized that specialized types of engineering, such as petroleum engineers and nuclear engineers received substantially higher wages. These specialized types of engineering caught my eye, and made me ponder whether I should go into a broad engineering type, or specialize in hopes of a higher wage. The engineering STEM class assigned research papers called Career Explorations; where we would choose an engineering career and research about what they do, what their education requirements were, and their pay scales. This really helped me delve deeper into the different types of engineering. I found that occupational growth is a commodity that substantially influenced how many people were going to get hired in that specified occupation. I learned that some of the specialized, focused engineers actually get paid less than the broad based engineers. Mechatronics engineering is a commodity that really intrigued me, it is a mechanical engineer with some electrical experience, too. However, Mechatronics engineers are usually required to have a masters degree in both electrical and mechanical