• Question: What's it like being a systems engineer?

    Asked by jazz130red on 27 Feb 2020. This question was also asked by ring130sit.
    • Photo: Stephen Durrant

      Stephen Durrant answered on 27 Feb 2020:

      It can be fun, frustrating, rewarding, difficult, enjoyable, tiring, all at the same time or at different times during the project, which has been running for over 10 years. It really depends a lot on what you are doing. The traveling can be fun sometimes but also too rushed if you only travel for one day to attend a meeting.

    • Photo: Abbie Hutty

      Abbie Hutty answered on 3 Mar 2020:

      It’s definitely a very varied job, as the tasks you have to do are very different depending on what phase of the project you are in (like concept design, detailed design, manufacture, test, etc)
      Most of the time it’s a 9-5 office job, but if you are interested or your job needs it you often get trips out to see the things you have worked on being manufactured or assembled or tested. That could either be in the same company, or at other companies, and in your country or other countries, depending on what part you are working on.
      You definitely have to work a lot with other specialists to understand their sub-systems or instruments and how their designs and requirements influence the overall design.
      It’s often complicated and has no clear cut solution as there are lots of factors influencing the decision to be made and some of them are conflicting! Sometimes to solve problems you have to do in-depth analysis on your own, sometimes you have to have detailed discussions with lots of other people to make sure that a solution works for everyone else too. So you have to be able to work on your own and also communicate well and work as a team.

    • Photo: Andrew Ball

      Andrew Ball answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      One has to know a little about all the different engineering disciplines that are used to do a space mission, and how they interact with each other and the performance of the equipment (in my case the science instruments). One gets to learn more about each speciality (thermal, mechanical, electrical, software, optical, etc.) when there’s a particular problem to solve, together with the specialists from those fields when needed.

Comments