It's Not Always What You Know

As a first-generation college student and engineer, starting an internship with a major company in my field was intimidating to me. On the first day, I remember thinking about what the job was going to require of the limited knowledge I had acquired in my first two years of college, but yet I was also so excited to finally start. I knew I was going to be entering into an entirely new realm– a vast realm of aerospace knowledge with defined principles and processes. Principles and processes that allowed for the creation of vehicles that can transport hundreds of people by air to just about any destination in the world. This was something that I had yet to experience. I was curious as to how different this new realm would be from what I was used to, which was currently a world of lecture halls and written exams, where the principles and processes that I learned were used to solve difficult questions on paper. Artifact 1 for this key insight is from the spring semester of my second year of college.  In my Aerospace Systems class, I completed a project where I learned and described some of the systems on a Cessna 414, a small aircraft. Even though I was learning about different systems such as fuel systems and flight controls, and began to really understand how they worked, I had never so much as seen any of them in person.  What I learned in my classrooms fascinated me, but I was ready to learn how to apply it. 

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There was a large part of me that was very anxious about how little I knew about aerospace and manufacturing and how it worked in the “real world.” I was going to be surrounded by people who had worked in the industry for decades, people who were considered the best in their field, the technical experts. I was so worried that I was going to be asked to complete a task and have no idea where to even start. I did not want to fail. However, exactly what I just described happened. I was asked to complete a task I did not know how to do. In fact, I was completely lost as to how to even start it. I sat at my desk in my cubicle and began to exhaust every idea I could think of to solve the problem I was presented with. After a few hours, one of my mentor engineers came to check and see how it was going. I was frustrated with myself for not being able to figure it out immediately. I felt like I should have been able to very easily figure out how to complete it on my own, and I felt embarrassed that I had not made any progress. The mentor engineer I was working with was neither surprised nor disappointed that I had yet to figure anything out. He said I was not supposed to understand everything yet. In fact, it was quite the opposite. While I felt relieved, I was also confused. Was that not the point of my internship? Wasn’t I supposed to bring with me some sort of expertise from my studies I could implement in order to solve real problems? 

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The engineer explained to me that not only was it okay to ask for help, it was actually encouraged. In no way was a college student who just completed their second year expected to be able to come in the first week and tackle every problem they were presented with on their own. And as it turns out, it is rare that an engineer functions that way. It was from that day that I started to learn a very important lesson. Coming into this internship, I knew that knowledge was important, but there was something that I misunderstood about it, and it was this: not all knowledge comes from what you learn in a classroom. There’s another kind of knowledge that is fundamental to engineering: experiential knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge that comes from observing what is going on around you, asking questions to people whose experience is different from yours, and even from making mistakes and figuring out why. 

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Experiential learning was something I was exposed to everyday throughout my internship. It showed up in meetings, when engineers asked questions to someone in a different discipline to figure out an additional element to their situation. It showed up on the factory floor, when something went wrong and a team needed to figure out how to fix it. It showed up in tours, when coworkers would get to learn about a facility different from their own, and ask questions to connect it to the job they currently do. It amazed me every single day how many questions people ask, and how the most important part of solving a complicated problem was “Who do we know that would have an answer to this question?” It was comforting to me to know that with every question that was answered, additional problems with new questions arose and it was never one single person who figured out the answer to all of them. The second artifact at the bottom of this page shows me at the end of my internship, in front of real plane, not just one described through papers and computer models. Here I was no longer scared, but I was proud to be a student engineer, and it was exciting to reflect on all that was accomplished during the short summer. The third artifact shows me during a networking experience during my internship, which was also a new skill I learned during this time. Here I met other people who were similar to me and created professional connections that may last my entire career. 

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This was something that I took back with me to my classrooms once my internship concluded. I was no longer intimidated by peers who knew more than me on a subject matter, I was fascinated by it. I wanted to know how they acquired the knowledge that they did. It taught me an entirely new approach to problem-solving. I was no longer frustrated when there was something I could not immediately answer on a homework assignment or an exam. I wanted to figure out how I could get the resources to solve it. I realized that it is not always what you know, it is what you are willing to learn and the steps you are willing to take to get there.