Why I’m an Engineer- CPT. Meg “Squirrel” Karper

This time around we asked our own Chief of Staff to throw 500 words together for us.

So I was asked why I’m an engineer, and it’s a good question given I’m not a really typical one. More a writer than a maker these days, I probably confuse people with my presence in the Discord and the Corps of Engineers on the whole a lot. Fact is, though, engineering has always felt like it should be my home if I was in Star Trek since I saw the original series.

What can I say, Scotty was a favorite. Be the Miracle Worker.

Even if I haven’t worked with it as a career outside necessary uses, I’ve always had an affinity for technology and machines. When I was a kid, I used to love to disassemble things to see how they worked – old alarm clocks, little machines that didn’t work anymore. An attempt was made at the family VCR once; fortunately my dad caught that one in time and the thing was spared my tools. My mom used to love telling me a story about the time I took a play screwdriver to my crib’s gate locks and popped it open when I was a toddler; she said I never looked back and was always inquisitive and hard to contain afterward. I think that if I’d been a boy, my dad would have had me elbows deep in his car before I could walk. I was the first one in the house to figure out how to set and use our first VCR back when I was 5. I used it to tape commercials because I liked the songs.

This technojoy (thank you Eddie Izzard) bled over into the world of computers and various hand-held gadgets – I’m never without something now. I love learning, I love playing, and I really love messing about with programs and things. I taught myself how to HTML code in text files in my teens and built a host of silly Geocities sites. I built IRC chat bots that got so good at responding to conversation they were actually banned by some of my friends because they were “eerie”. My mom used to work for IBM and somehow I ended up teaching her how to use Windows 95 when that got installed on her work computer instead of the actual programmers she worked with. I’ve come very close over the years to abandoning whole careers I worked to be in for something to do with computers, I just never pulled the trigger on the idea. I’ve just always been here, plugging away and learning snippets of things on my own terms, producing what I can. Maybe someday I’ll really lean into things and become a proper programmer or data manager, but for now I’m content tinkering with things in the background and helping people who are more versed in these things build rather than leading in it.

I’ve also always been a support person for most of my life. I consider it my goal to make other peoples’ things happen. I’ve been a stagehand, a lighting tech, a go-fer, an organizer, and a nurse throughout my life. I like to keep things running smoothly even in the midst of chaos. I’ve often said that if I’m doing my job properly, no one notices me doing my job.

I am an engineer because that urge to know and fix never went away, and I’m proof that you can be one of us without knowing how to program computers, without being a professional in graphic design, and without being trained in a specific type of making or building things. I am an engineer because I like seeing things work and knowing that I was a part of making it happen.

I am an engineer because I always wanted to be the Miracle Worker.