The TV Engineer

by SHEILA 30-B-2 FPE

"Engineering is the Profession in which a knowl- edge of the mathematical and natural sciences gained by study, experience and practice is applied with judg- ment to develop ways to utilize, economically, the materials and forces of nature. Education and Welfare.

U.S. Dept. of Health,

Being a member of that large minority of TV's who are also engineers of one sort or another, I have had to give a good deal of thought as to why this un- likely combination appears so frequently. One could hardly choose a less lady-like profession. There are only 5000 lady engineers reported by the Engineers Joint Council to be working in this country at present, out of one million total. The only GG engineer I ever knew didn't last two years at it, and in war-time at that.

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I'm not about to solve this mystery. No one really seems to know why a person becomes an engineer, or a TV either. All I can do is to offer a few person- al observations and speculations. In my case, the choice of profession and the discovery of my feminine secondary personality must have occurred within a year or so of each other, at about age 13. I'm quite sure that neither one caused the other; but I'd hate to try to prove that the frightening discovery that I turned feminine from time to time didn't influence me to choose a way of life that was conspicuously masculine. At any rate, that decision was made on the superficial basis that my father's engineering friends had a lot of fun and were reasonably well paid.

Actually, the combination has worked out quite well. Who else so much as the engineer grows up with the full expectation of making his day-dreams come true? One song at my college cheerfully offers our services to build "a bridge to Mars or a ten-foot shaft to Hell. " In an atmosphere like that, who would fear a little project like raising a secret sister? Our open-

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