The internet is flooded with people throwing around the phrase “Dream Job”, but few rarely take the time to define it. Let me clear it up for you. If you look at it from the flip side, you could define it as a job that you don’t hate. But that isn’t a very good definition because there are probably any number of jobs which you wouldn’t hate but you wouldn’t love either. I actually think that’s worse. Being comfortable is the enemy. In a job that you just “don’t hate” it’s bad enough to make you complain, but not bad enough to do anything about. This exact scenario leads you to look back at the last 40 years of your life and say “Oh, shit. What have I done?”

Students often feel like they are cast into the working world with little experience and nothing but complex equations floating around in their head when more useful skills such as networking and personal management might have been useful. What I want to share is something my granddad taught me while I was questioning my devotion to the engineering program and the post-secondary institution I was a part of. Though this framework is often reserved for the physical constraints of this world, at its core, it is simply a way of problem solving. With this in mind I have decided to approach the conceptual challenge of success from an engineering perspective in an attempt to help others logically define, execute, and apply the necessary steps towards their version of triumph.