I was born in 1957. If you are on the younger side of things, I bet you’re thinking something along the lines of, “Wow! That’s AGES ago!” You’re right. It is. That’s why it’s taken me such a long time to get from then to now (I took the scenic route).

Along my rambling (some may say “bumbling”) journey through life, I’ve met people who desired to be engineers but who feel they messed up and “dropped the ball” in one way or another. First, I’d like to say that having an engineering degree is by no means the be all and end all. I have friends who never had the opportunity to obtain a degree but who could engineer me under the table any day of the week. Contrariwise, I know people who can boast multiple engineering degrees but whom I wouldn’t trust to change a light bulb.

For some people, becoming an honest-to-goodness engineer ends up being a relatively straightforward process. For example, they might sail through high school, get grades sufficient to open the door to university, breeze their way through their degree of choice, and enter the workforce as a bright, shiny, newly-minted engineer. Others, like your humble narrator (I pride myself on my humility) end up taking a slightly more circuitous route. For some, like yours truly, luck may end up playing an oversized role. For others, networking is key (“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” as the adage goes).

In this column, I’m going to tell the tale of two people whose engineering careers could easily have failed to come to fruition—me and my friend Adam Taylor. I’ll also mention a few other folks along the way. The key takeaway I want to emphasize for those who feel they may have missed the boat to engineering success is that there’s more than one way to become an engineer.

As an aside, do you have any regrets in life? Is there anything you’d like to go back in time and change if you had the chance? The reason I ask is that I recently read The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. This is an extremely thought-provoking book. Suffice it to say that this tome has more than a quarter of a million ratings on Amazon, which is a mind-boggling amount and a reflection of the book’s impact on its readers. We will return to the topic of regrets later, but first…

Max’s Story

I don’t like to boast, but there are a great many subjects about which I have no expertise. For example, I’m not an expert on American education. My understanding is that, in order to graduate from high school, you need to establish a total number of credits in subjects like English, science, math, etc. Also, this is a pass/fail situation. You either get your high school diploma… or you don’t. If you fail the first time around, you can take a group of General Education Development (GED) tests later in life. There’s no time limit on this. For example, Evie Eaves of Amarillo, Texas, left it until she was 97 years old before earning her GED credential.

Things were different when I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed youngster growing up in the UK. I went to what they called a “primary school” from the age of 5 to 11, after which I moved to what they called a “secondary school” from the age of 11 to 18 (I don’t know what terms they use now). When we started secondary school, we took all the subjects they could throw at us: art, English (language and literature), math, history, geography, chemistry, biology, physics, modern foreign languages (typically French and/or German), religious studies, and more that I forget.

When we were 14 years old, we got to decide on which topics we wished to focus. As I recall, most kids took 7, 8, or 9. Some took more; others took less (since schools didn’t have computers at that time, creating class schedules must have been a nightmare for the teachers, bless their little cotton socks). We then focused on our chosen subjects until we were 16 years old, at which time we took our Ordinary Level (O-Level) exams. The grading system went from A to F, with A through C being classed as passing grades (there was also a U grade meaning ungraded or unclassified, but I don’t know what you had to do or not do to get that).

This wasn’t a pass/fail situation per se. You could leave school at 16 proudly waving as many O-Level certificates as you had. If you went for a job at your local fish monger, for example, they would probably be happy if you had any O Levels at all (and equally sanguine if you didn’t). Other jobs might specify the number, types, and grades they required for them to consider you for employment.

If you opted to remain at school, you focused down again, honing-in on the subjects you liked and—if you were planning on going to university—those subjects most appropriate for your intended field. In this case, as I recall, most kids took 3 subjects. Some took more; others took less. I took math, physics, chemistry, and general studies. We then focused on these subjects until we were 18 years old, at which time we took our Advanced Level (A-Level) exams.

The idea was to get enough A-Levels of the required types and grades to get into the university of one’s choice. Each university had different requirements, with Oxford and Cambridge at the top of the pile wanting mostly A grades with the occasional B, and other establishments having more modest requirements.

Unfortunately, 18 is also the legal age to start drinking in the UK. Due to a series of unfortunate events, I had more beer than was good for me the night before my A-Level exam in math (mayhap I was presented with a bad beverage). As a result, I ended up with less than a passing grade, which was unfortunate because math was one of the A-Levels every university required if you wished to take a degree in engineering. As a result of all this, I ended up wearing my sad face, while my mom ended up wearing her frowny face (which isn’t something you want to see too often, let me tell you).

To provide a little background, I’d been playing with electronics since I was around 12 years old. I started with simple circuits that made mildly annoying sounds, and I worked my way up to more complex circuits that made extraordinarily annoying sounds. Although my first attempts at soldering resulted in textbook cases of dry joints, I persevered until I ended up with a black belt in this art. I’d wanted to be an engineer for as long as I could remember. I wanted to do things like build robots and design space probes. Now, with my poor showing in A-Level math, it seemed as though this was not to be.

So, this is how I found myself in the summer of 1975 turning my thoughts to… I’m sorry, I just need a moment… I’m not crying, I have something in my eye… getting a boring job and doing boring work for boring people at a boring company (I fear my heart wasn’t in it, as it were). So, you can only imagine my surprise and delight when a letter purporting to come from Sheffield Hallam University (or Sheffield Polytechnic as it was back then) wended its way to me. This official-looking document, which was presented on what appeared to be the polytechnic’s letterhead, informed me that the engineering department wanted me to come down for an interview on a certain day at a specified time.

I arrived on the appointed day at the designated time with a smile on my face, a skip in my step, and a song in my heart. The departmental secretary (visualize an old and grumpy version of Donna on Suits) looked me up and down with a disdainful air before saying, “And what can we do for you?” When I explained I was there for my appointment, she asked to see the letter. When I showed her this dispatch, she put her head in her hands, muttering “Oh God, not again,” under her breath. Now, I was by no means an expert in these matters, but even I could tell this did not bode well for my future.

Eventually, she raised her head to explain that some black-hearted scoundrel was scouring the A-Level results to see who had failed, and then sending them letters like mine giving the recipients false hope (I have no idea how this nefarious nobody knew what degrees his or her victims had their hearts set on). Departmental Donna then took a deep breath, drew herself up, stridently proclaimed, “That’s enough! I’m not putting up with this $%!+ anymore! You SHALL go to the ball have an appointment,” picked up the phone, called someone high up in the department (a person whose name shall remain unspoken to protect the innocent), and told him she was sending in an interviewee, giving my name and details.

When I entered this person’s august presence, he was rifling through a humongous, printed copy of what was quite possibly the A-Level results of every student in the UK. When he located my record, he frowned, winced, looked up, and mournfully intoned, “I’m very sorry, but you don’t have a high enough grade in math to be accepted for an electronics degree.”

I looked at him and he looked at me. We looked at each other. We both had sad faces. Who was going to blink first? It might be that he was just making conversation or was desperate to break an awkward silence when he asked, “Have you ever actually held a soldering iron or built anything of an electronic nature?”

This leads me to ask, “Have you ever heard of Alice’s Restaurant Massacree by Arlo Guthrie?”

I’m thinking of the part where the narrator says, “And I proceeded to tell him the story of the Alice’s Restaurant Massacre, with full orchestration and five-part harmony and stuff like that…” Well, that was me talking about my adventures in soldering and building things that made annoying noises.

He then (foolishly, if you ask me), said, “What is the most recent thing you’ve built?” Maybe he was trying to catch me out. So, I proceeded to tell him the story of my brainwave amplifier, which boasted a super-sensitive high-gain pre-amp stage to pick up the wearer’s brain waves, a fabulous filter to weed out any noise, and the awesome ability to selectively extract the frequency associated with a meditative state. It then used the extracted brainwaves to trigger a pink noise (“chuff, chuff, chuff…”) generator to transport the wearer into a trance. I think my overtly enthusiast rendition nearly put him in a trance without needing to resort to using my brainwave amplifier (which was fortunate because I’d neglected to mention that I’d failed to actually get this bodacious beauty working—I decided nitty-gritty details of this nature would be surplus to requirements).

“Right, you’re in,” he said.

And that was how I took the first tentative step on my path to become the leading engineer of my generation (at least, according to my dear old mother).

In Part 2 we will introduce Adam’s story, which is strangely reminiscent—and which ends up being inextricably entangled—with my own. In the meantime, do you have any tall tales of engineering derring-do you’d care to share with the rest of us?