The Steps of a Career Track in Engineering Research

• Love working with your hands. 
• Love learning new things. 
• Love building and constructing experimental apparatuses to figure things out about the natural world. 
• Go to grad school to do more research like this.
• Learn that behind every physical process, there is a model.
• Learn that some models are incredibly complex and require many computational resources.
• Learn that in order to succeed in experimental research you must have a good understanding of these models and subsequently, the resources for how to use them. 
• Learn that this pretty much means learning more Linux and computer science than you ever thought you would as a Mechanical Engineer interested in fire and combustion processes. 
• Spend a lot of time learning how to use and build computational resources to build models. 
• Do not lose sight of the experiment you want to compare the model with. 
• Eventually lobby for an experimental approach to test the model. 
• Exist grad school as a very marketable person who has both advanced scientific software development skills as well as mastery of a few experimental techniques, particularly those that have to do with diagnostics. 
• Get awesome job. 
• Do awesome. 
• Be awesome?