Scientist versus Engineer

    I used to mention myself a scientist rather than an engineer. Perhaps, I thought scientists to be higher-classed than engineers. Scientists is related to dreams, creativity and genius. Conversely, when it comes to engineers, one may think of work and rigidness. There is Einstein as a typical scientist with white messy hair. However, engineers? You would only recall some company like GOOGLE. It seems that an engineer can not exist as a self-proved unit. Engineers live as part of something. Simply speaking, engineers couldn't exist without users enjoy their product.

    It happened yesterday that I started considering a new idea of the value of engineers. It was my roommate found difficulties launching the webpage of Taiwan U. He said that he could launch any other websites but Taiwan U. Besides, he tried it on UIUC campus and there is no problem getting connected to National Taiwan U. So he concluded that there is something wrong with our network provider, Comcast. He is anxious about this because he is urgent to check e-mails in NTU mail server but he don't want to go to UIUC campus to do that at night. 

    I thought it interesting. The truth is that the server of NTU is working well. How come one can only connect from UIUC campus but not from Comcast? It's probably that NTU server denied the request from Comcast or the server of Comcast can't find where the server of NTU is. Anyway, I recalled that some hacker would trying to launch different server so that they could escape the tracing from police. It reminded me to use VPN to connect to UIUC server first. After that, I tried to connect to NTU and, surprisingly, it worked. So, my roommate is happy and I looked good.

    What's the relation between this event and the issue about scientist-engineers? The point is, engineers exist to solve problems for others, which is very different from scientist. In some ways, scientists do solve problems. But the motivation is for themselves. It's the desire to seek the truths. For engineers, they do this because there is a need.  

The world needs engineers, but not necessary scientists.