Dr. Jenahvive Morgan is an engineer that has had several different types of jobs in the field; as of right now she is an Academic Teaching Specialist here at MSU. Dr. Morgan teaches the “Intro the Engineering Design” course that all engineers are required to take, so Adam and I decided to interview her for this prompt.
We asked Dr. Morgan to list a few misconceptions about the field and she had a very interesting answer for us. She told us that the information you learn in your classes is not enough to get you through a job; “it barely gets you started. You might not even use the material you learned in class, because on the job is a whole new adventure.”
She also gave us some advice about choosing our type of engineering, “The disciplines overlap depending on who you work for. It’s good to be comfortable in multiple disciplines then see where your interest is.” This is helpful for me, since I haven’t decided what type I want to be, Dr. Morgan explained that it is more valuable to be comfortable with multiple and then see where my job takes me.
When asked about the different forms of writing that must be done in the field, Dr. Morgan referenced a previous job she had working for Consumers Energy. “You have to write letters to get permits approved and you have to communicate with other departments within a community. It’s different at other companies, sometimes they use email or texting more often than written forms of communication.” This is interesting because engineering is usually not known for having any type of literature involved, but there are a lot of different elements that go into each type of job.
In my opinion, the most interesting part of the interview was after we asked her, “What is the hardest type of communication between engineers?” Dr. Morgan replied with a little bit of laughter, “Engineers are not known for communication, so all is hard. But the most difficult is actually away from the job, bonding and social aspects are extremely challenging.”
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