4 Engineering Lessons I Learned from my Puppy

by Pat Sweet | Aug 17, 2012 | Article, Careers, Getting Started, Professional Development

My wife and I recently bought our first dog. She’s a Goldendoodle we named Massey, as in Massey Ferguson tractors. My Agricultural Engineering readers can consider that a nod in their direction ;-)

In any case, this purchase was something that happened a little bit out of the blue. Don’t get me wrong – my wife and I had talked about buying a dog for ages. The opportunity to do so, however, just kind of came out of the blue.

Now that we’ve had her for a couple weeks, I’ve had a chance to learn some lessons from the family quadruped. The more I thought about it, the more I realized these lessons can be applied to any working engineer.

*** 4 Engineering Lessons From My Puppy

1. Take the plunge! Good things happen. Like I said before, my wife and I talked about this for ages. We knew what kind of dog we wanted. We had worked out who would come home at lunch to let her out. We had investigated obedience training. We had talked this thing to death, then finally an opportunity came up to buy our pup. It was scary as hell when we did, because all of a sudden our fun ideas became real. And you know what? Turns out everything is working out OK. Life is different to be sure, and we’re still not 100% settled into a new routine, but it’s good.

I like to think of opportunities for engineers as being similar. If you just jump into something, it tends to work out well. Just do it!