A student project, built in the open
Engineering Exploration is a personal project of mine — built to give honest, no-hype information about what engineers in different fields actually do, day to day.
A lot of career-exploration content leans hard on hype: impressive job titles, big salary numbers, inspirational language that doesn't actually tell you much about the work itself. This site tries to do the opposite — real day-to-day descriptions, honest trade-offs, and a clear flag whenever something's uncertain or worth double-checking instead of presented as settled fact.
I built this because I remember standing in that exact spot back in high school, staring at a long list of engineering majors with no real idea what any of them actually meant day to day. Most of what I found online was either a vague list of job titles or straight-up recruiting copy, so I set out to build the resource I wish I'd had: something that tells it straight about what the work is actually like, and where the honest trade-offs are.
This site was built by Jaime Gomez, a student at MSU — it's not affiliated with MSU, any other university, or any engineering organization. Just one student's attempt to put something clear and useful together. And if something here reads as inaccurate or outdated, that's worth knowing: this is maintained by a student, not a career-counseling professional.
The interest quiz works the same way — a starting point based on how you answer a set of questions, not a verdict on what you should do with your life.
For more on where the numbers on this site come from, and what's editorial judgment versus a cited source, see Sources & Methodology.
How this site is built
It's a static site — Next.js, React and TypeScript, with every page generated ahead of time. There's no backend and no database, and nothing you do here is sent anywhere. The illustrations, icons and charts are hand-written SVG rather than pulled from a library, which is why they all look like they belong to the same set of drawings.
Three of the simulations do real work rather than printing the answer to a formula. The beam solves for the shear force, bending moment and deflection along its whole length by working through it step by step; the pendulum solves the actual swing equation, not the small-angle shortcut most textbooks stop at; and the projectile includes air resistance, which has no tidy formula at all. Each one then checks itself against the exact answer wherever an exact answer exists, and prints how far apart the two landed — usually less than a thousandth of a percent.
Every page works in English and Spanish. Keyboard navigation and screen-reader labels are tested rather than assumed, animations back off if your device asks for less motion, and the maths behind the simulations has its own test suite that anyone can run.
All of it is open source, if you want to see how any piece works: the code is on GitHub.