By Mia Hanuska
Prompt: Please describe the interdisciplinary nature of your chosen field of study and how it complements or supports other fields.
I hunch over my desk, fingers covered in glue and hands cramping from cutting. My project is slowly coming together, the result of hours of intricate measurements and prototypes. It’s a tedious model, each wall a slightly different length, or shape, or height. But I don’t approach it like the other architects in my class. I think of the total height of each outer and inner wall, building it not layer by layer, but piece by piece. I combine my engineering skills with architecture to create model unique to me.
Mechanical engineering integrates itself perfectly with architecture and architectural engineering, and my background in MechE helped me create realistic models in my summer architecture classes.
“You are to design an addition to the original building that adds meaning to the structure,” my professor’s voice boomed through the room. But I couldn’t just create a creative design: I needed it to be plausible. My mechanical engineering background grounded each idea in realism—what could really be constructed? Nothing floating, of course, but what about fully glass? How would the weight and load be dispersed across the frames? As I answered my own questions, the final design slowly became clear in my mind. Engineering ensures that what architects design can translate well to the real-world, and turns an architect’s dream into a physical creation.
Plus, mechanical engineering’s CAD skills are fairly applicable to many fields. Experience in different programs and commands in engineering is incredibly useful for architectural design software, as I learned in my Intro to Revit class last summer—the course that made me interested in an architectural engineering minor. CAD taught me the beauty of regulations. In robotics, I found the constraints of designing a robot as an exciting challenge, and read the entire rule book to familiarize myself with all the requirements.
This interest in rules spread to my writing for the school newspaper, where I found myself delving into legislation on data security and EU pasteurization, figuring out how to interpret and adapt the information to a mainly teenager audience. By researching for articles and determining the meanings of the complexities of law, I realized patent law would perfectly meld my interest in rules and regulations with engineering. Patent law requires meticulous and detail-oriented scrutiny of designs, for which my CAD background and engineering mindset skills, along with the depth of engineering courses, prepare me well.
Moreover, engineering complements law through providing an objective stance on certain issues. One of the main focuses of lawyers is finding loopholes, finding ways the law does not apply to certain situations. However, since in engineering, there’s typically only one right answer, it turns a quite subjective field into an objective one.
I add the last miniature person to my model and glue the last tree into place. I marvel in its beauty, the clean lines from my architectural skills combined with the critical thinking from engineering and the regulations from law. A perfect trifecta that combined to make a gorgeous work of art.