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The profession of the engineer is also today one of the most important and delicate and needs a lot of study and working practice; a continuous updating of your knowledge and working experience is also necessary, given that every object we use has been designed and tested by engineers.

My father was an Italian engineer, graduated in 1952. During about 20 years of work, before his precocious death for cancer in 1978, he had to change several times his working fields, following the priorities of the Italian engineering company (Ansaldo) for which he was working. My father, in fact, started as a naval engineer, then, he passed to the nuclear field and, eventually, to the production of magnets, turbines and industrial electric engines, for which Ansaldo was leader in the world.

This personal experience means that the first thing you should forget, to become an engineer, is working all life on the same things or fields; on the contrary, you need to have a high flexibility, either when you work autonomously (to readily understand and satisfy your clients' needs) and when you work for a private or public company or for the public administration as a civil engineer. This is necessary because the companies must frequently change their production strategies and, in any case, innovate their products, created just thanks to engineers' work.

- Needed skills -

You can become a good engineer if you have a bent for Mathematics, Geometry, Technical Drawing and Industrial Design; to be clear, not one among them, but all of them.

In the last 30-35 years, the informatics revolution has massively become the base of engineers' work so that technical drawing and design for projects of every type are performed using computer simulations today and projects are not anymore made on paper.

I still remember, when I was a little child, my father when he worked at home on wide paper sheets full of industrial drawings he carried with him in long cylindrical containers. Today, the content of a whole library of projects can be recorded in a little CD-ROM or DVD and projects are drawn by means of CAD (Computer Aided Design) programs and transferred on CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) ones. This last program can directly give instructions the machine that must build an object, also with the use of sophisticated simulation software.

These programs are fundamental to draw, build and test engines, cars, airplanes, appliances, buildings, ships, chemical reactors, PCs and software programs; just the latter

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