Why Do Electronics Need a Separate Printed Circuit Board? by Sean Michael

Why Do Electronics Need a Separate Printed Circuit Board? by Sean Michael - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

I have a habit of looking at things that already work and wondering why we still make them that way.

One question that stuck with me recently was pretty simple: Why do electronics need a separate printed circuit board?

I spent eight years in the Navy as an electronics technician aboard USS Charlotte, a fast-attack submarine. Most of the equipment I worked on was built around the same basic idea. You had the structure of the equipment, and somewhere inside it was a circuit board connecting all the components that made the thing work. That makes sense, and it has worked for a long time, but I started wondering what would happen if those two things became one.

Instead of printing a plastic part, installing a circuit board inside it, and then connecting everything together, what if we could print the electrical connections directly into the part itself? Conductive material could run through the plastic like wiring, with components, sensors, switches, or antennas built into the structure as it was made.

At first, it was just one of those ideas that shows up in my head and refuses to leave.

Then I started looking into it and discovered that researchers and engineers are already working on things like printed electronics, conductive materials, and structural electronics. That made the question even more interesting because I wasn't wondering about something completely impossible. Pieces of the idea already exist.

It also gave me about fifty new questions.

How much current can a printed conductor safely carry? What happens when it gets hot? How do you repair a circuit buried inside a part? Could you recycle it? Could you print different materials in the same object and make the structure itself part of the circuit?

That is what I like about engineering. One question usually doesn't give you one answer. It gives you better questions.

After twenty years in the military, I am returning to school at 45 to study Computer Engineering at Saint Louis University. I spent the first part of my career learning how electronic systems worked well enough to maintain and repair them. Now I want to understand them well enough to design something better.

Maybe electronics will always need circuit boards.

Maybe they won't.

I want to know why.