I think I will add my two bits as an experimentalist.
The Standard Model is not the result of brilliant physicists thinking deeply and coming up with a theoretical self consistent formulation that miraculously fitted the data. It is the result of strong interplay between experiments and tentative models that coalesced to what is now the standard model. In its creation it has incorporated a large number of constants from the experimental data, because the theory comes with a number of unknown constants. In a very real sense the standard model is a shorthand encapsulation of almost all the known data of particle physics, some incorporated, some predicted, and at the same time it is able to predict by calculations phenomena not measured yet. This is, for the energies available to us up to now with the LHC, quite sufficient.
There are indications that the SM cannot describe everything in elementary particles even at these low energies as with some CP violation discrepancies.
Theory follows its own path: theorists are not satisfied with the phenomenological success of the SM, as for high enough energies calculations break down due to infinities not wrapped up. Even before strings and string theory supersymmetry was seen as an attractive solution to resolve infinities at high energies inherent in the SM. At the same time because of cosmological data theorists are pursuing the quantization and consistent unification of all four forces at many fronts. String theory has the necessary group structures to accommodate the SM and Supersymmetry ( a mirror of the SM yet to be seen experimentally) and is able to incorporate gravity in the whole scheme. At the moment it is the only scheme able to do all this. Hard working phenomenologists are trying to predict effects at LHC energies, but with no success at the moment, since the SM is enough to explain whatever has been measured ( or published, there may be exciting stuff down the pipe)up to now.
As an engineer you will understand that the experimentalists follow the SM blue prints looking for discrepancies to announce new physics. At the moment there is none, so most of them are not talking about strings, although there are groups testing phenomenological predictions from large extra dimensions in string theory.
