A profile is sketched of engineering statistics by contrasting it with statistics courses for students of mathematics on one hand, and for social science students on the other. Aspects which play a role comprise level of abstraction, amount of technical detail and choice of subjects. A brief outline is given of feasible forms and contents of statistics courses for engineers. Special attention is devoted to the nature of exercises suitable in this context. Questions addressed concern the degree of adaptation to the student's own field of study and the (dis)advantage of embedding the pure statistical problems into a technical ‘story’.