In which I share some insights into my chosen profession

Don't push your kid into engineering...no, really...engineers are weird, weird people many of whom spend their days sitting in little boxes with fabric covered walls and bad flourescent lighting. We...er...they have trouble enjoying mainstream entertainment because the science is JUST SO BAD!!!, take pleasure in pointing out the flaws in your perfectly crafted if not completely logically sound arguments and love nothing more than making little graphs on spreadsheets that represent things like the trend in automobile gas mileage against time correlated to average trip distance, speed, temperature, weather conditions, number of passengers, amount of cargo carried, percentage of turns which were left, change (and rate of change) of altitude during trips and time spent in the drive-thru line paying for overpriced coffee which can be made just as good at home if you will only buy the really cool, fancy, incredibly complicated machine that's available at that geeky web site.

Really, you don't want to push your kid to become an engineer. Most kids who become engineers have parents who begged them to not become engineers...but they knew there was no choice because, in most cases, engineers are engineers from birth...and if they survive the horror that is the teenage years (and don't die from blunt force trama delivered by a dodgeball in a PE class that they will spend years trying to repress), they'll find their home in one of those little fabric covered boxes with bad flourescent lighting.