After publishing Progressive Engineer for awhile, we’ve learned a few things about the engineering profession. The main one that stands out: the fun and unique jobs engineers find themselves in. As a licensed engineer who worked in industry before becoming a journalist, I thought I knew the various types of engineering pretty well. But every time I venture out to research a story for these pages, I marvel at what a neat job the people I interview have and wonder “where were these jobs when I was looking for engineering work?” The truth is, they’ve been there along; you just have to scratch beneath the surface to find them. In a nutshell, that’s what we do.
If you’re a technical person, you know why engineers need a greater voice. We hear how our infrastructure has fallen into disrepair over the years and now will require trillions of dollars to bring it up to par. Society needs more engineers than ever before, and we face shortages of them. But the general public and youngsters typically don’t understand what engineers do, and people aren’t encouraged to enter the profession. Progressive Engineer strives to answer this void. You’ll hear us talk about STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) a lot.
Merging Engineering and Sustainability
Another aspect that goes hand in hand with being a progressive engineer is environmentalism and sustainability. You’ll notice that many of our stories deal with energy conservation, renewable resources such as solar and wind power, green building, recycling, global warming, and pollution abatement. Our mission is to show the world that engineers are the key to solving our environmental problems at the same time we teach engineers the finer points of sustainability.
Taking a personal angle, we write about engineers as human beings and describe their accomplishments in an easy-to-read fashion. This way, we can educate a teenager considering an engineering career and at the same time inspire a working engineer immersed in technical details every day. The bottom line: we show the fun of engineering, to inspire engineers, educate outsiders, and encourage young people to enter the profession. We do this through a combination of in-depth features and profiles that you can curl up with in tandem with the types of news items you can pick up quickly on your smart phone or tablet.
Far More Than Stories
We serve as a comprehensive information resource for today’s engineer as well as non-engineers looking for information on engineering. Our searchable Engineering Firm Directory assists those looking for consulting engineering services and helps firms market their services. High school students can access our engineering school directory to help them choose a college to attend. Engineers can use our listings of organizations and licensing boards to help with their careers. We like to think of it as a one-stop search engine for engineering needs.
Our Humble History – A Message from Founder Tom Gibson
After growing up in upstate New York and receiving a BSME from the University of Dayton, I moved to North Carolina and worked as a mechanical engineer for several companies in North Carolina and Virginia. Specialties evolved for me in machine design, hydraulics and pneumatics, and stress analysis. I developed an interest in writing in college by serving as an editor of UD’s engineering magazine and by taking a class in freelance writing. After leaving the corporate world and working for awhile as a consulting engineer, I became a full-time freelance writer specializing in technology. My mission: carve a niche making technical material understandable and interesting to engineers and lay people alike. Stories with my byline appeared in publications ranging from Popular Science to Invention & Technology to regional business magazines. I later started Progressive Engineer as a merger of my engineering and writing interests.