Fix the Thing That Keeps Breaking, and Prove It Stays Fixed
Maps to: Engineer · Mechanical Engineer · Product Designer · Industrial Designer · Manufacturing Engineer · Product Manager
Something near you keeps breaking: a drawer that sticks, a bag strap that tears, a hook that has come off the wall twice. An engineer would not fix it first. They would work out what the thing actually has to put up with, in numbers, because nobody can say whether something is failing until somebody says what passing was. The rest of this card is finding out whether your fix meets that number, by breaking your own fix on purpose, out of whatever is already in your house.
You're done when: A working fix on a real broken thing, in the hands of the person who lives with it, plus one page they can open: what it had to survive with numbers in it, photos of the rough version, what happened when you tried to break it, the one thing you changed, and a plain line saying what it will not survive. Not 'I fixed it,' but 'I said what it had to do, I broke it to find out, I changed one thing, and here is what it still cannot take.'
How this shows up on a resume or college app
I took a thing that had failed repeatedly at place and turned the complaint into a testable statement: it had to hold number, number times, including the misuse case. I built a rough version from materials on hand, tested it to failure, and found it gave at where, not where I had predicted. I made one change, ran the identical test, and recorded both sets of results. I handed the fix and a one-page report to the person, including a plain statement of what it still will not survive. I learned that a design nobody has broken yet is a design nobody knows anything about.
When you finish you have the thing itself, plus a Common App activity description Sidequest drafts from what you actually built.
Not sure yet? Play 5 minutes as an engineer first and see how the work feels.
See what this career pays and what it takes to get in.
The plan
- 1
Step 1
Pick the thing, then write down what it actually has to survive
Engineers get handed a complaint, and a complaint cannot be tested. 'It keeps breaking' has no number in it, so nobody can say whether the next one is any better. So the first hour turns the complaint into a line with numbers, and that line is the ruler you measure everything else against for the rest of the day. Write down your first guess at why it breaks too, before you check anything. If the real answer turns out to be something else, your written guess is the only way you will ever notice. By the end of this hour you have one page started, and everything after this gets written onto it.
- 2
Steps 2-3
Build a rough one out of what is already in the house
Now you make something. It is meant to be rough, and rough is not a lesser version of the job, it is the job: an engineer's first one exists to be broken, not admired. Use only what is already in your house, because the second you go and buy something the card stops being free and you stop being willing to break it. Think of two different ways to do it before you build, because the first idea is almost never the only one, and the second idea usually tells you something about the first.
- 3
Step 4
Try to break it, and write down what happened
This is the hour that separates engineering from having a good idea. You built it, so you want it to work, which is exactly why you now have to go at it properly. You are not checking whether it holds. You are finding out where it gives, because until it has broken once you do not know what it can take, and neither does the person you are about to hand it to. Write the test down as you go, not afterwards from memory, because afterwards you will tidy it.
- 4
Steps 5-6
Change one thing, test it again, and hand it over
Here is the judgment, and the whole point. You know where it gave and you still do not know everything about why, and you are going to change it anyway, because the person living with the broken thing cannot wait for certainty. Change ONE thing, so that when you test again you know what did it. Then write the page properly and hand it to the person who has been putting up with this, including the line saying what it still will not survive. That last line feels like it weakens the page and it does the opposite: it is the reason somebody believes the rest of it.