I am an engineer. Period. I have always loved the adventure and challenge of creative problem solving, of finding a way to make something work and persuading others to let me do it. If I were not an engineer, I suppose I would be an architect. Then again, maybe I would be an attorney, or a psychiatrist, an entrepreneur, a novelist, a performer.

Being an engineer at heart, I find that most other careers provide only portions of what I love about engineering. The truth is, I would probably find most other careers too limited in variety and challenge.

What attracts me to architecture is how it blends inspiration with utility. I once engineered a remote control for whole-house automation. It provided the utility of control of all in-house systems while being intuitive enough for a guest to be able to use. It had to fit into your hand, look perfectly in place next to the good china and inspire oohs and ahs from visitors.

Being an attorney provides the opportunity for competitive persuasion. Facts and evidence are great, but how well they are researched, understood and presented makes all the difference in the world to the outcome. Engineering is full of competing ideas, trade-offs and pathways to end solutions. They must be researched, strategically weighed out and agreed upon. The pathway from idea to end product is greatly shaped by engineers' abilities to understand the requirements and persuade themselves and others of the best possible solutions.

Psychiatrists help people understand that what you get out of life is largely due to what you put in. They have to deal with stress, insanity, emergencies and finding balance. They help people cope with life, deal with change, find strength, overcome weakness. Engineers have to deal with the laws of physics: You can't get more out of a system than you put into it. They have to balance target requirements with reality, time and effort. Engineers constantly deal with change: feature creep, performance failures, resources, international design efforts and technologies, and more. New designs have to strengthen output power, range, throughput, user interface and functionality while overcoming weaknesses in power consumption, size and noise susceptibility.

Entrepreneurs deal with creating strategy, organizing resources and generating plans of action to form new businesses. Entrepreneurs are evangelists for ideas and their potential to yield a return on investment. They form ideas into viable, compelling business plans. I've been an entrepreneur. I founded a company, raised millions of dollars, created a product, presented it to the market, sold it to customers and moved on to other adventures. Every engineer requires the wherewithal for strategic planning--a course of action for project completion. Engineering requires getting buy-in for budget, tools, talent, resources and schedule. Ideas have to be sold to those who need to contribute to making them reality.

Novelists are communication artists. They use words to create understanding in their readers' minds. Books solidify ideas so that people can envision and follow a story. Writers create definition and personality for characters and depict how they interact. Books create a reproducible standard that can be interpreted and delivered in many languages. I have written thousands of pages of architectural specifications, product feature requirements, design reviews, theories of operation, research findings, project plans and technical specifications. For groups to work together effectively, they must be on the same page when it comes to project specifications, component specs, interface specs, performance requirements and intended operation. It is not good enough to write documents that you can understand; it is neces-sary to write documents that others will not misunderstand.

Performers are artists who make complicated actions look simple. A good and entertaining performance requires preparation, timing, coordination, the right materials, a lot of skill and a little luck.

Engineering is like a good song and dance. It requires a lot of coordination--and a lot of failure in practice before the final presentation. The quality of the final product is directly related to the combined talent of the company. Engineering also requires good frequency control, noise reduction and contingency plans, and often improvises when things don't go as planned.

I remember as a youth pulling apart an old phonograph and a small transistor radio to create a stereo sound system. I remember taking over installation of the electrical wiring in our house when my father was having difficulty with a four-way switch. I remember my first electronics kit and putting together all the projects. I remember plugging my first multimeter into a 120-volt outlet and making sparks because I had used the wrong inputs.

I guess I have always been destined to be an engineer. And in a way, choosing to be an engineer has enabled me to be much, much more.

Why would I choose to be any one other thing, when being an engineer has enabled me to be so many?

Paul Vincent is mixed-signal ASIC team manager at Cirque Corp. (Salt Lake City).

 Engineers forecast 'opportunity'
We asked engineers to answer questions about a wide range of technologies, from Bluetooth to WiMax and everything in between. In the course of this inquiry, we learned not just what engineers are working on now, but which technologies they regard as the most promising for the future. One insight is that the number of engineers working in a promising field does not usually match the potential in that field. For example, almost 60 percent of our respondents deemed nanotechnology a ''promising'' area. But fewer than 20 percent of those respondents said they are either working in nanotechnology or expect to do so in the immediate future.
For the sake of this exercise, we have designated the discrepancy between current activity in a technology and expected future activity in that technology as the ''opportunity gap.'' The opportunity gap in nanotechnology comes out to a whopping 39.7 percent. Bearing in mind that the comparison is more interesting than scientific-casting engineers as technology handicappers—we calculated the opportunity gaps for all of the technologies tracked in the survey.