Do you have to be creative to succeed in engineering?

I'm thinking of doing biomedical engineering.

I don't think I'm particularly creative or very innovative.

I'm not one of those people who are into how machines work and are put together.
The thing that attracts me to biomedical engineering is stuff like artifical organs, the mechanisms of the body and how we can create things that work alongside the body. But I don't know if I'll be good at it, if you know what I mean.

I just really don't want to make the same mistake and choose the wrong course again.

Reply 1

dhutch

There design required, and creativeness is good for innovation, but its well known a lot of engineers lack it and there are ways and means around that as well a huge swathes of engineering (like almost all) that are far more iterative than out-of-the box.

Daniel

Reply 2

dada55

Original post by dhutch

I have read a lot of your posts and was wondering, how often do the problems you have had to solve while doing your work as an engineer require original ideas/solutions?
What I think I'm asking is, is do you get a lot chance to be creative or is there a set way of solving most problems?

Reply 3

Ben Kenobi

Not necessarily. You just learn to understand how to solve problems mathematically and from previous tried and tested knowledge.

Reply 4

WGR

Original post by saulg

Engineering is engineering, you will be using standard engineering principles that mechanical engineers use just applied to machines that work with biological systems. Sounds to me that you would be better off in medicine or something similar. Biomedical engineering is just plain engineering but for things that work with the body so if you aren't interested in machines you will get bored. People make similar mistakes with chemical engineering because they think it is chemistry and get shocked by all the thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, statics and dynamics that they have to do.

Reply 5

saulg

Original post by WGR

Is engineering really just about machines? Is it about taking stuff apart, looking at how it works, putting things together to make it 'work' better etc?? I enjoyed maths mechanics modules the most. I liked applying maths to real situations. Aaah, I don't know if engineering is for me or not.

Reply 6

dhutch

Original post by dada55

It depends slightly what you mean by original or creative I guess. As said, the the number of of occasions where we/I come up with a truly original never-be-done-before-in-the-history-of-man type solution, that is an earth shattering new development in engineering pushing forwards the frontiers of physics, certainly in my industry, is really very rare. However you are constantly coming up with solutions to problems, even just designing a bit of a random bracket to go between one place and another can be done either really badly making something heavy, likely to fail, expensive to make, hard to assemble, or it can be a really slick one piece folded steel part that's self aligning, robust, nests in the flat, and looks the business.
There are some tools that can be used to develop ideas, and others that can be used to assess solutions, to help with the process and larger jobs. But a lot of it is more touchy feely seat-of-the-pants type work. Again as I have put elsewhere, even if you are using tools like FEA the ability to produce a good first iteration, and then understand the results and turn them into design improvement, is priceless.

Original post by saulg

Google defines engineering as 'the branch of science and technology concerned with the design, building, and use of engines, machines, and structures' other sites go into more detail. For the graduate engineer you can largely rule out the 'engine operator' segment, and for a mechanical engineer, the 'civil engineering' segment, and obviously if your working as a design engineer, you can focus on the design bit.
Having an understanding of how things work, and the ability to take them apart and put them back together again, is very helpful in designing new and improved versions of it, as well as to an extend, seeing what others are doing that might be similar. Although you don't tend to spend much of the day stripping and rebuilding machines. Engineering is a broad a term as 'Medical', some medics cut people open, some discuss symptoms wiht people, and others sit in an office understanding recovery stats, or discussing the politics of it! At which point as an engineer (or medic) you have a very wide scope of what you do, from standing on the shop floor or improving day to day process, right through to working on new ways to model and mathematically resolve fatigue data.

World is your oyster.

Or you can go and work in finance....

Daniel

Reply 7

dhutch

God that's a very 'monday morning' answer!