Ethical Issues in my Profession:

In the United States, all engineers are expected to act in a professional manner and present themselves professionally. They are very serious and work-oriented and are always working to improve society. From the companies we visited while in China, most of the same rules apply as far as professional and ethical conduct goes for engineers. The engineer who led us on a tour of CapitalBio was very professional and analytical, always trying to figure out statistics for the questions we asked. This is no different than engineers in the United States. The companies we visited did not mention much about diversity as American companies do. We did see construction workers working in the open street with little to no safety equipment on. None of that would have been permissible in the United States. In that regard, the United States has higher safety standards than China, at least from what we saw. We also learned that the average workers get paid much less in China than average workers in America. This means that the company as a whole, or even the higher-ranking officials, gets to pocket more money. This is problematic for the American economy because businesses in the United States utilize Chinese workers more so than American workers because they will work for less, and the business owners get to make more money.

Educational Breadth as Professional Development:

Despite the differences in culture and business practices, the education of an engineer in China would be very similar to that of an American engineering student. All of the same problems are essentially the same: environment, financial gain, sustainability, and practical applications must all be considered in the engineering field, no matter where you are in the world. These are all basic things that any engineering student will learn about during their education in their respective engineering branch. The engineers we met and talked to during our company visits all stressed these four main things when asked about engineering aspects of the company. For example, the tour guide we had at CapitalBio told us that they were trying to condense their “Lab-on-a-chip” device into a handheld system which would eliminate plastics and other non-recyclable components. It would also be more practical for a patient to use, rather than having them go to a hospital to get the same tests done. This device, if perfected and advertised well, has the potential to make the company huge profits. All of the aforementioned principles were all addressed by Chinese engineers, and that is exactly what we are learning at the Swanson School of Engineering. The only difference is cultural ignorance, so if I ever wanted to design things in China, it would benefit me to take courses on modern Chinese culture.

Lifelong Learning, Continuing Education as Professional Development:

Again I will reference CapitalBio. Our tour guide there said himself that before he got the job that he had no idea what he’d be doing there. He said that the engineers there do a little bit of everything, so it didn’t really matter what type of engineering you were, they would teach you what you needed to know when you got the job. What we learn in school is in its basic form is only this: we learn how to learn. College education gives us what we need to enter the workplace and there learn what we need to do our jobs and do them well. Albert Einstein once said, “Education is what remains after you have forgotten what you have learned in school.” From what the tour guides on our company visits have said is that they learned what they needed to know from their jobs. The tour guide at CapitalBio admitted he didn’t know how the microarray imaging devices worked until he got to CapitalBio and started working for them. Life-long learning is important for engineers because you really have no idea what you will be doing until you get a job and they tell you what you’ll be doing, no matter how much you plan to be doing something else.

The Social Environment of Professional Life:

It is important to know about global events because it is important not to hit a soft spot in the wrong way. For example, in China we didn’t want to go around asking the people at our company visits what they thought of their government officials because that is not something that is regularly talked about in Chinese business. Just because we are willing and able to say whatever we think about Obama in the United States does not mean that Chinese professionals care to talk about their own government. I think there are more political, economic, social, and diversity issues in American companies than in anywhere else in the world. In China, I didn’t get that as big of an impression on stressing equality as I do in the United States. We didn’t get a real sense of what the people we met were like in their personal lives as compared to their professional lives either. We did have CNN in our hotel rooms that mainly discussed goings on in America. I couldn’t understand what the Chinese news stations were reporting about, but they do have an outlet to United States current events through CNN at least, so they can be up-to-date about American news if they wanted to be. Life and business in the United States can be affected by any regulations put on Chinese business because the American economy depends so heavily on the Chinese labor force.

Functioning on Multi-Disciplinary Terms:

Because engineering and business principles collaborate so well together, it is easy to be an engineer among a team of businesspeople. Engineers design a product that will then have to be marketed, and raw materials must be bought to turn the product from design to reality. Business and engineering are co-dependent, and that leads to an easy marriage between the two fields to improve society. It should not be hard to establish effective communication between an engineer and a businessman because the engineer will design something and the businessman will then have to market it and buy the raw materials. A challenge involved with maintaining effective communication, however, could be that the businessman doesn’t know all of the specifications of the designed product because the engineer didn’t communicate them well enough. Then the businessman would not appear convincing if he tried to market something he didn’t know anything about. In a foreign country, both the engineers and the businesspeople would have to be well-informed of the culture they are in. The engineers would have to know what is needed in that area, and the businesspeople would have to know how to market it. If I were an engineer travelling with businesspeople, as long as effective communication between the marketer and the designer was maintained, there should not be a problem in selling whatever product was made.