Exploring Engineering Ep. 01: What’s Engineering?

Tsu-Jae King Liu
So engineering is really about applying knowledge, so that’s math and science, to solve some important problem for people or society. So engineers, you might have heard, they design and implement solutions that will somehow benefit humanity.

I think Berkeley Engineering has a really strong tradition of coming up with new innovations that are adopted, commercialized and have tremendous impact, positive impact on society and also our students, our graduates, they go on and they become very impactful entrepreneurs or leaders in engineering and actually leaders in other fields as well.

Laura Vogt
Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley is a new podcast hosted and produced by me, Laura Vogt, the director of student communications in marketing and communications at UC Berkeley Engineering. You just heard from Tsu-Jae King Liu who just stepped down as Berkeley Engineering dean, her definition of the study of engineering. We will be hearing more from her later in this episode.

In the next nine episodes, Exploring Engineering will be diving into each of the departments and programs that are available here at UC Berkeley Engineering. They include aerospace engineering, bioengineering, civil and environmental engineering, electrical engineering and computer sciences, engineering science, industrial engineering and operations research, material science and engineering, mechanical engineering and nuclear engineering. I interviewed current undergraduate students, alumni and faculty, so that you can learn about their research, experiences and the trajectory of their journeys into engineering.

Each episode will focus on one department or program and includes introductions to the study, career options, misconceptions and how people were able to learn about the majors.

As I said earlier, we will now be hearing from Tsu-Jae King Liu, who was the dean of UC Berkeley Engineering until she started a new position as the president of the National Academy of Engineering. I wanted to be able to have an overall view of engineering, and especially of what engineering here as Berkeley Engineering, before we go into each of the individual departments. Tsu-Jae is internationally recognized in academia and industry for her innovations in semiconductor devices and technology. And I’m so excited for you to hear from Tsu-Jae, her thoughts on what engineering is, the purpose for the work that engineers do and how you can learn more about the profession.

Tsu-Jae King Liu
First of all, thank you, Laura, for doing this podcast series. I think it really is exciting to have this opportunity to convey how impactful and rewarding engineering is as a field, to study and to work in.

So how did I come to study engineering? Well, it was roughly during my high school years, when I was exploring the possibility of going to medicine. So I went to visit the Stanford Medical School and took a tour of their labs. And the anatomy lab is something that really struck me, because we saw cadavers and bins of human body parts, like heads and arms and legs. And I realized at that time, then I didn’t have the stomach for medicine, but I knew that engineers designed and built devices and systems that doctors use to diagnose and to treat patients. So that interested me in engineering rather than medicine, because I knew it was a field that could still benefit people.

Laura Vogt
I like the idea that you did it specifically because you want to be there for the community,

Tsu-Jae King Liu
Right to help people, right to benefit society, that’s fundamental. There’s always some higher purpose to our lives. And I thought that would be a good purpose to serve.

Laura Vogt
There was a jump in my train of thought here where I started thinking about the actual technology and how it’s benefiting society. I was just thinking of my five-year-old nephew who saw a TV with, like, the one that were like two feet—

Tsu-Jae King Liu
Oh, he really deep ones with the cathode ray tube, CRT displays.

Laura Vogt
He saw one of those and was like, what? Why? Why, that? And it’s just funny, the innovations…

Tsu-Jae King Liu
Yeah, that is just one example of how technology innovation can really revolutionize the way people live, work and play. I mean, imagine having a phone, your phone with no display at all. You wouldn’t be able to get as much done, and you can’t keep in touch with people, your loved ones, and your coworkers and so on. That’s just a great example of the transformative impact of technology.

As you mentioned, there are different subfields of engineering. So we have bioengineering, we have electrical and computer engineering, we have mechanical engineering and industrial engineering and nuclear engineering. The first thing is to learn about these subfields, and so it’s probably good to familiarize yourself with what they do and the impact that these different types of engineers have, and see which ones match your own personal interests and passion, then you can decide which program to apply to. So I’d advise people to try to learn a little bit about engineering before they even apply, just to make sure it’s a good match for their personal interests and passions.

The world’s greatest challenges today are actually quite complex, like, let’s say, if you want to call it, climate change, or more extreme weather events, you know, artificial intelligence. They’re so complex, they’re multifaceted. And therefore the solutions need to be multifaceted, and that means the teams that develop the solutions need to have multiple disciplinary expertise. The expertise of a team has to cover multiple disciplines in order to come up with some solution.

Our engineering degree programs do require that students take courses outside of their major of course. So, let’s say if you’re an electrical engineering major or any other major, you have to take courses outside of your department, in other engineering departments, and you also have to take social science and humanities kinds of courses, because if you think about it, engineers, they design and build devices, systems, processes that are supposed to benefit people in society. And if you don’t understand people in society, how are you going to make sure that your solutions are not going to unintentionally harm people or society?

So this is why our degree programs are designed, the requirements are designed to really support students taking courses in a diversity of departments across Berkeley.

Laura Vogt
Is there anything that’s happening at Berkeley Engineering right now in terms of research that gets you really excited that you’re like, yes, we’re on the forefront of this?

Tsu-Jae King Liu
There are a lot of things. It’s, you know, pretty much any field or specific area of research you can think of. There’s some faculty member on the Berkeley campus who is a leader in that area, but it is truly inspiring for me to always learn about something that one of our faculty is working on.

So I think I would just make a pitch for reading the Berkeley Engineer magazine, and it’s available online for free on our college website. Just reading stories about what research projects our faculty are working on to, you know, towards a more sustainable and equitable future, towards improving human health, or making sure our artificial intelligence is equitable. You know, all kinds of things that our faculty are working together to help shape a brighter future for everybody.

Laura Vogt
What does Berkeley Engineering do to confront the ethics of engineering?

Tsu-Jae King Liu
This is an important question, because you can see that people and society are only becoming more and more dependent on technology today, and technology is designed and built by engineers, and so it is all the more important for engineers to get some practice in considering ethical aspects of their work. Right? If you’re developing some new thing or new device, new technology, you do have to think about your intended audience and then what the potential unintended negative consequences on people in society could be as part of the process of developing or innovating a new solution. So that is built into specific classes in the engineering curriculum. But I think the trend is that every class that talks about some specialty in the field of engineering should actually touch upon the topic of ethics. It is better to embed ethical considerations in each engineering course. That’s the best way for students trained to automatically think about these, to include these considerations, in the future when they’re working as professionals.

The field of engineering is expanding. So a few years ago, we added a new major in aerospace engineering, because aerospace actually is becoming more and more important as people are interested in exploring space and maybe have more operations in space, even just between the Earth and the Moon. This is lunar space. I think there’s so many opportunities. Aerospace engineering is a really exciting new major. It’s one of our most diverse majors. It actually has over 40% students who come from under-represented minority groups, and over 40% of the students in our aerospace engineering major are first in their families to go to college. So it’s wonderful to see such a diversity of students interested in that major.

In the coming year, we will launch new majors in electrical and computer engineering more focused on the hardware side, because now that AI with the proliferation of artificial intelligence, there’s more and more need for computing devices, information devices, but now people realize, hey, there’s not enough electricity to power all the data centers and so on and so forth. So we really need to have more innovations on the hardware side to improve the efficiency of computing devices. So our ECE program is aimed to meet that need.

And then we have a new separate environmental engineering baccalaureate program, because there are more students who are interested in environmental engineering. How do we make sure that we have a more sustainable future? We want to make sure we don’t use up all the resources in this world more quickly than needed, and maybe we can do something to preserve our environment.

So I think these are just examples of a few new degree programs that we’ve started in the past year and in the coming year, and I’m sure that this trend will continue well into the future. I think our website has a lot of good information, and we have a YouTube channel. We have social media channels, so I encourage you to visit those venues. A key thing to keep in mind is that engineering is a rewarding career, but engineering as a field of study, I think is really worthwhile, because students learn how to work collaboratively in teams, how to come up with solutions, to think critically, analytically, to solve problems, and those kinds of skills are valuable, no matter what career path you choose to follow, ultimately.

Laura Vogt
All episodes of Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley are available on our website, engineering.berkeley.edu/exploringengineering as well as Spotify and Apple Podcasts. You can also read the transcripts, find a dictionary of acronyms (I know there are a lot), and find the Berkeley Engineer magazine that Tsu-Jae referenced.

Each episode of Exploring Engineering also has an episode page devoted to that specific department. It includes resources, links to videos and more, making sure that you have a good starting off point for your research into all the different facets of engineering.

I invite you to please share Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley with your friends, classmates and school counselors, giving others the chance to learn and explore what being an engineer means.