Engineering Background?

[Susan]

Ralitsa,

I also started as a Marine Engineer in the UK Merchant Navy, I got my second engineer's certificate and promoted to third engineer before I left the sea to go to University. I am finding the results of this poll very interesting, thank you all for responding.

[Paula G]

Neither Susan or I mentioned that this was part of a series of "talking heads" painting a portrait of Lodon through the experiences of Londoners, this item was titled "The Bike Mechanic" and had a bit of surprise for many of us.

What I should have said earlier, is what a good item this was. The transgendered person was very articulate, confident and expressed herself very well, no drums where beaten, just a light hearted, but actuarate recounting of experience. This was very good radio and the BBC are to be comended for both teh quality and the content.

[Absaroka]

First degree was in pschology. Now I'm an architect. Thats sort of like artistic engineering.

The members of Pink Floyd met in architecture school.



There do seem to be certain themes over represented among us. A fascination with trains and model railroading, and I've also heard that an interest in ham radio was common. I like to think these are remnants of our boyhood, because so many of us started dressing as boys also. In psych speak they are all manifestations of our inner child, or our playful side. Looking at trains in a dress beats hell out of golf, IMHO.

Another common thing is we tend to be over represented in the military, perhaps as a form of over compensation, or perhaps it's just our responsible feminine side (think mama grizzly) asserting itself.

Zari

[Julie Dawn]

B.Sc. (Hons) Elec. Eng. (Retired)
Life long railway modeler.
Started in ham radio at the age of 10, this led onto the electrical / eletronic engineering.
Does this make me a stereotypical CD?

[DonnaT]

I think you over compensated, Julie

[Anthony Simon]

It's an interesting question, though - how much different activities CDs do are related and in what way. I mean if there's overcompensation, there's also compensation. Another way of putting this is what Missy says about loving both sides of her life, male and female.

So then building kits, playing with trains and building stuff with Mechano (?sp) (kids-adults engineering set) are all things I did - and they're all pretty archetypally "boy". But then I had a much less easy to accept desire to dress up as a girl. So maybe part of the playing at (kind of) boy engineer was a way of balancing the part of me that wanted to be pretty girl.

On the other hand, both dressing up and making kits etc are things one does by oneself. Like that's a similarity.

[Absaroka]

It's not that we played with trains and radios as children. It's that these become our hobbies in adult life in greater proportions in cders.

Zari

[Anthony Simon]

I guess there are two aspects of this. Like either you play at "boy" engineer and then you grow up and become an engineer for real - or you go on playing at "boy" activities after you grow up. The first could be just an element of the balancing of male and female elements I mentioned above - the second might be a hanging onto one's child part because one values that.

Like playing with trains in a skirt sounds pretty much like a "tomboy" activity - so then that would be both an expression of your child part and to do with CDing. Only, in this case, like both male and female elements of your personality are expressed in one go.

[Susan]

The year I graduated from university we had 5 five women on my course (of 70), one of whom won the prize for the best degree. We were all delighted for her, it was well deserved and we had the only female prizewinner in the Engineering Faculty.

Engineers are born, it doesn't matter what sex they are.

[Kittie]

I have an HNC in Mining Engineering. I am an Incorporated Engineer (I.Ebg)
I also have a degree in Christian Theology.
I started a degree in the Enginering Faculty but failed the 1st year hence the HNC. We had a girl on our course but girls can be Coal Mining Surveyors but not phyicallly be a miner under our Mines & Quarries Act. Hence they can 't be an offical in a Coal Mine since that dem ands experience as an actual coal=miner

[Carolynn]

I always liked miniatures as a child, no matter what they were. I got a train for christmas a few months after my one and only doll was burned in a trash barrel by my father with the knowledge of my mother. They felt I spent to much time with the girly thing. I was 7. So then I got the train and construction equipment and cap pistols as presents. The construction toys and pistols were little played with, and I passed them on to my younger cousins when I was in my teens and working out a way to suicide. I know the toys would be played with, at least.

I also got house and building kits. I "played" with the train set, and built the houses so that roof and one side would be removable, made a second floor and interior walls in the larger ones, and I put up "wall paper", rugs and furniture made of balsa wood for the figures that came with the set (and that I bought later) would be able to occupy. In short, I knew I would not be getting a doll house, so I made do. I spent lots more time playing with and creating the buildings than I did just running the train. No one else in the neighborhood had the S scale American Flyer, so we couldn't take our trains to one another's tracks to run them. They all had Lionel with the three rails.

I also constructed houses of balsa and did the interiors. I think the first one I did started out as a one room match stick cabin as a class project when I was in 4th grade, but my next was a two story, 7 room log cabin. with interior doors, window glass made of cellophane from the outside packaging from cigarette packages, and a "fire place" made with baked clay bricks and glue and appropriate sized pebbles for the interior face. My parents were just sure I would be an architect. They were wrong.

I still like miniatures of all kinds, and built models of many sorts as a kid. I kept my electric train and houses at my Aunts in the attic, until she died in 1995, and they were stolen in a burglary before I could move them to my new house. I got insurance settlement on the contents that were stolen, and I went to ebay and found the same train and some S scale buildings and tried to replicate the stuff that was stolen. I was surprised how much it hurt that it was taken. Perhaps the hurt was at the violation, and then I "knew" (or perhaps had strong suspects) who had broken in, but there was no proof and the local small town cops were totally incompetent. Anyway, being a collector of junk, I also got other American Flyer stuff from Ebay, but have never set it up. I guess I will sell all of it one day for whatever I can get for it, as my grand nephew has not interest in it. Just computer games.

Anyway, I think where I was going with this meandering exercise was that you don't have to be an engineer to have had and played with an electric train and it's accessories. Sometimes the accessories are more important than the trains. I do still like to see other peoples sets in operation around this time of year.

Carolynn

[DonnaT]

One of the other things I liked to get into when I was little were all the electronic gadgets/tvs sitting in our basement. I liked taking them apart to see what they were made of, and see if I could get any to work.

My granddad gained experience at Westinghouse and was an engineer on the river locks, my dad was a telephone repair lineman/foreman.

I would get electronic kits for Christmas when others would get toys. I converted a crank phone to a modern one (or was it a modern one that worked off the crank), and knew I could get work with the phone company, but joined the army anyway so I could get the benefits for going to college.

In college I waited until my junior year to declare Electrical Engineering, because I found I was also good in the Mechanical Engineering classes.

Working in the patent field, I've put both to use in getting patents for various clients.

[Anita]

Interesting thread. I liked both sides of gender as a child, it seems. I really wanted to be the TV cowboys, and I also really wanted to be Cinderella. I loved my toy guns and train set, but I also liked my sister's doll houses. I didn't spend a lot of time with the latter, though. I might have liked dolls, but I knew that wasn't "OK," so I had lots of stuffed animals instead.

I don't feel like the boy activities were over-compensation, but that's just my feeling about them. They seemed like part of me. At the same time, there was a lot of pressure to do team sports in my town; to not do them was to be invisible, and I knew I didn't want that. Left to my own devices, I might have gravitated toward piano or violin lessons instead.

The engineering-minded part of me is still there, and does not seem to line up with the 'girl' part of me very well. Certainly I know that women can be competent at engineering. It's just that if I'm expressing my feminine side, I wouldn't tend to do it sitting there designing a circuit board. That activity has little to do with gender expression, for me. If anything, my gal self is a distraction when trying to do concentrated thinking. She's not a distraction if doing something automatic, like playing guitar.

When I write that, I see the difference between me and transitioned women. I only want to experience certain parts of a feminine life. They want to live it all the time, whether designing circuits, or going to a formal ball. It doesn't matter what they do, as long as they're living as women. Whereas I pick and choose how I'm going to be a woman.

I note here that of my four closest friends who became fulltime women, three of them had little interest in their boy activities, and longed to be doing girl things. The fourth picked up a guitar early on, and did not do any of the traditional boy activities at all.

[Absaroka]

Carolynn I had Lionel O27 guage with the 3 rails as a child. Now I have N scale of various brands. I also have a few of my dad's American Flyers which ge got in the late 1920's and are now probably colletors items.

It's fun to run the trains but everyone I know in the hobby gets into the modeling aspect of it, namely building houses, scenery, and so on. Perhaps interestingly the most difficult thing to really make a good model of is a tree- most folks just use weeds and think of them as miniature trees.

Zari

[Anthony Simon]

I was isolated as a boy (part of that was going to schools that were the other side of London from 7-15) and becoming part of a group through doing well at sport was important to me - like Anita. I was always fairly quick and small, but nothing to write home about. The thing that did help me was like an ability to quickly "conceptualize" a situation - so like I could "see" kind of instinctively what a sports situation was. I'm pretty sure that helped me get in teams and helped my self-esteem no end. I think that's one of the things that's translated to my adult life.

I also hankered to be one of those heroes from the movies or comics - I think I particularly liked "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" (at least the theme always does weird things to me) - like cowboys and heroic soldiers. But then I remember once playing a game with my brother where we were making up a Wild West story and at one point saying that we should dress up as saloon girls. He did seem very dubious about this and was only too glad when we could get back on our horses and ride out of town...

I was just so conflicted about my desire to dress up as a child that the kind of "boy" activities did act as a, very conscious, balance. Apart from anything it was just so great to feel I was actually competent at doing "boy" stuff (e.g. making kits etc) because I was getting, pretty much continuously, the opposite message from my mother. Like there was this undercurrent of asserted uselessness because of my CDing tendencies (which were very largely unexpressed).