What is design engineering?

my 8-hour CAD cycle

I think I like the allure of being good at everything. Olin College offers three types of degrees, Mechanical Engineering,Electrical and Computer Engineering, and General Engineering with a concentration in pick your own. When it came time to declare a major, I decided to pick my own and declared as Engineering with Design.

Because it was a self designed major, it came with a self designed description that basically said that at the end of my four years I would be good at designing things that had mechanical, electrical, and software components.It made sense at the time, as someone who wanted to do everything.

Over the past year, the more people I told that I was majoring in “Design Engineering” the more confused I grew over what my self made title meant. It’s a really strange feeling when your boss gives you a job and says “this is a perfect problem for a design engineer, wink wink,” but my internal dialogue is like “what is a design engineer even???” So far what I’ve done at work is mainly a lot of CAD, things like converting a model from one CAD software to another, making motion animations, detailing models, designing a bottle rocket docker, etc. And I’m wondering if I’ve dug myself into this design engineering hole where I spend eternity clicking on a computer making 3D models.

So while I had this internal definition that a design engineer is someone who does everything, I had no clue what others thought design engineering meant. So I asked. One answer I got was that a design engineer is like if you combined a designer, and an engineer. Assuming the designer is the person who comes up with some awesome concept and what it does, and the engineer is the person who tells the designer that “no you can’t do that, because XYZ.” So what I’m getting is I’m destined to be a creative yet rational masochist.

I found a more promising definition on wikipedia which more or less said that design engineers take ideas through conception, design, prototyping, and whatever steps come after that. It did sound a little bit like being a project manager while still having to do some grunt work.

But anyway, those are some outside definitions of design engineering, and over a year what I think I want to do with my life has changed too. I had the “do all the things!” mentality at the beginning of sophomore year and while I still kind of want to be good at everything, I’ve figured out that mechanical and software things come easier to me than electrical things. That may partly be due to the fact that most people aren’t exposed to things like circuits in high school outside of V=IR.

So I’m faced with this dilemma where I really want to be good at doing electrical things, but I find it really hard to use and retain what I’ve learned in class. More and more often I can’t tell if I’m forcing myself to do something I don’t like because it’s good for me, or if I’m choosing to give up too early because it's easier. I don’t have an answer to this yet, or an answer to what a design engineer is, but for now I think I’m replacing ENGR 3370: Controls with ENGR 1330: Fundamentals of Machine Shop Operations.