It’s the Ente of the world
Tonight I went out and ate a duck in front of some of my friends. The group included my two housemates, a visiting German friend, and two of her friends. My housemate had just finished explaining his experiences pitching spec scripts to the LA film market, when one of the girls turned to me and asked “So what’s your test on tomorrow?”.
Background info: I have a test tomorrow. I racked my brains for something exciting to say, but in the end the only words that came out of my mouth were “digital hardware”. This was, in fact, a condensed version of the actual answer. The actual answer was “Using C to program the ATmega16 AVR microcontroller’s serial port, timer, PWM and ADC functionalities”. But I didn’t want to sound like a Dusche.
See, I’m slowly realising as a student engineer – especially the half that’s an electrical engineer – that there’s no easy way to explain what you learn about to people without boring them to death or dumbing it down so many shades that it doesn’t really explain anything at all. It’s alright if you write movies or newspapers or novels, or teach english, or dissect small animals. These are activities that people are familiar with. Even organic chemistry can be made exciting (I synthesise meth), and biology ain’t too bad either (I study the mating patterns of sloths). But if you tell someone you’re performing a Fourier transform on a square wave to see what its fundamental frequencies are… well how do you glamourise that?
I think the essence of what I am trying to communicate here is that in other areas of study it is possible to reduce an explanation of things to a level that people can relate to, like books, movies, or psychology. With a technical study like engineering, quantum physics, or nanotechnology, there’s fewer ways to do that. Let’s go back to the example before: Microcontroller. Do you know what that is? What it does? I guarantee you you’ve used something – probably many things – with one in it today. But how do you explain it to someone non-technical without boring them or confusing them? A programmable chip? That’s still jargony. Really tiny computer? That sounds condescending and is inaccurate.
I still don’t know, but anyhow. I think I have a solution that avoids all these pitfalls. It involves lying about almost everything, but let’s just agree to say it’s stretching the truth. The next time someone asks me what my test is about, I will answer with: Robots.
Everyone loves Robots.
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