Blur Connections: Mechanical Workshop in first year of Biotechnology course!

I went to popular engineering college in south India. As is customarary for all engineering courses, there was a common syllabus for the first year of all branches of engineering. This included mechanical worshop, electrical & electronics, computer science etc. Although we enjoyed all of this as it gave a more broad and kind of 'engineering' feel, we never thought of using those rudimentary techniques in a sophisticated field like biotechnolgy.
Three years down the line, during my final year, I decided to design a bioreactor for my project. All my mechanical engineering knowledge came into picture right away. We had to use chemical engineering principles to optimize the mass and heat transfer, CAD to design the model and workshop (sheet metal) to build a prototype before actually getting a stainless stell bioreactor manufactured in a factory.
As Steve Jobs says, "you can only connect the dots looking backward". Cutting sheet-metal and hammering it to get a perfect shape of a cone during the first year it was difficult to realize how it would connect down the line. But looking back it was a lot more easy.