Engineering School Grads - Tradesmen or Thinkers? 325
El Cubano asks: "ITworld is carrying a story (sorry, no printable version) saying that John Seely Brown (former chief scientist at Xerox and director of PARC, currently teaching at the University of Southern California) is encouraging engineering schools to change the way they educate. The article, quotes Mr. Brown saying the following: 'Training someone for a career makes no sense. At best, you can train someone for a career trajectory...'. What do you think? Should engineering schools be producing tradesmen (like an apprenticeship program) or should they be producing 'thinkers' (people who can cope with a wide variety of problem inside and outside their area of expertise)?"
handle (Score:2, Insightful)
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I graduated the EDDT (Engineering Design and Drafting Technology) course at TRU, and so far I have not done ONE thing that have been trained to do there. Sure, I've got a skill base, but I have to find a job within those parameters, and then I have to learn almost everything about that job, before I can be halfway competent.
Know what I learned the most doing in that course (as well as several people in my class?) The summer between first and second years, I helped build a 3000 sq.ft. house.
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I don't know a single engineering employer that expects you to know anything right out of college. You said it yourself - you have the base for them to build on an train you on what they specifically need you
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I'm a third year electrical engineering student at the University of Calgary, and I can say that classes are more about the knowledge base than about whether you can use them in a career. They teach you to learn quickly and efficiently, and that's what employers are looking for. To even become an accredited engineer [apegga.org] you need to have 4 years of on-the-job experience, because learning in class is only half of the actual education. There are also programs such as internship [ucalgary.ca] that a
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Those are dumb employers then. When we hire someone we look for people who learn quickly. First off we have lots of proprietary systems that we won't be able to find someone with experience in anyways (and they'll most likely have to learn them before becoming effective). Second, technology is always changing. I want someone who can learn and adapt to all of the new technologies that are coming
Re:handle (Score:4, Insightful)
And contrary to what most people think, most places won't put you to work fetching coffee. I was developing firmware for embedded devices and working on operating systems for most of my co-ops.
Re:handle (Score:5, Insightful)
Schools have tremendous resources available for those that want to put down the beer and get hands-on experience. The next 40 yrs of engineering will be hands-on experience.
What matters most for the 4 yrs is the density of education. And that comes from learning how to think, analyze, learn new methods, etc. Hands-on apprenticeships are typically little more than pattern-matching. A good education builds mental capability for a wide variety of pursuits.
A decade later, that apprentice is worthless when the market changes and he no longer has a job. With a good education, one can easily come up to speed on a completely new style of engineering because he has the mental tools to be effective.
In their efforts to woo corporations and become more competitive as corporations themselves, higher education has become a whore to the corporate agenda and that has (and will continue to) damage the future preparedness of our students.
I think ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The best thinkers I've been around have been the ones who were self taught and educated themselves. I also noted that unless they have some sort of benefactor they're all working minimum wage jobs so they can think in the evening.
Now if we could just get the physics world to acknowledge tokomak was all about funding and zero about providing energy then some new blood can go off and look in remains of cold fusion etc for the way forward.
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Society needs an educated populace. The thing is people forget that 4 years isn't much time to learn enough for the next 50.
The current system lets people go to grad school, which is heavy thinking, when they want more. At 18-21, there's only so much thinking they're gonna do. It's also probably the only time they're intellectually green enough to have the patience for all that training (later on, people need to be sold on its
Both (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Both (Score:4, Insightful)
That said, It took awhile, but I eventually came back to engineering and the focus that was used while I was in school, and deeper understanding of the physics permitted me to jump back in after a decade and succeed far more then if it had steered toward a tradesman approach that I see others had.
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All book-learnin' and no experience makes you flexible for the future, but practically useless for the first year or more of professional work. This means companies have to pick up the slack and train you to do a job once you've already been educated. Companies don't like this and students resent the fact they've spent X years learning and must now spend X more years training, but it gives the best results (and the best engineers) overall.
All training and no education is a recipe for disaster - yo
The education system. (Score:2, Insightful)
I am not sure the question makes sense. Engineering is about solving problems. That isn't a rote field, but teaching the solving of problems is done by example. Ideally you want to educate somebody able to solve a novel problem.
<rant>
The problem is that engineering students are spoon-fed book-learning in the traditional system but they are rarely forced to apply that learning to solving a real problem that accurately simulates what they'll be expected to do when they start working for a living. Engineering studies should try to compromise between the traditional spoon-feeding of knowledge and some way of simulating what you will do most of the time in the real world which is solving problems using the book-knowledge but in
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Most of engineering (the actual jobs people with degrees get) is actually rote. Checklists for valves. Plugging in manufacturers numbers into cfm equations for HVAC systems. Making a wiring diagram for a building just like the last 10, except this one is *7* stories, not 8.
Engineering that is problem solving are the
Re:Both (Score:4, Insightful)
Engineers who are doing rote jobs like checking valves obviously aren't very useful as thinkers, so they're stuck doing mindless things.
It takes both kinds (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is, they tend to over complicate somethings.
For example. Who would you hire to do the wiring in your house, and electrician or an electrical engineer?
Granted this is an extreme situation, but in theory, shouldn't both be able to do the task? Yes. However, an electrician has done it many times before and has the benefit of experience.
Now, who do you wanted designing a NASA space vehicle?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
As far as the NASA spacecraft goes
Duct tape is only half the solution (Score:3, Funny)
Missed the point entirely (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because it is now fashionable to call people who are not engineers OR tradespeople by the name engineer is no reason to try to dumb it all down.
Re:It takes both kinds (Score:5, Insightful)
As an engineer that is involved in hiring for NASA, I want an element of both. While course content and (to a lesser degree) GPA are important, I really need people who are able to quickly learn new things and work with people. Many of the problems we have are unique and you'd never be exposed to them in school. In a lot of cases even new guys get tasks that require a lot of digging, thinking, and research to solve.
It's challenging to get a new hire to stop thinking in terms of rigid sets of problems on a short (no longer than a semester) timetable which they solve largely by themselves. They need to adjust to understanding how to work on projects that no one person may understand, involve chasing some dead ends, and bring together ideas and work from several people or organizations.
As the article puts it:
"The best way to achieve that goal is to change the classroom from a lecture hall dominated by a "sage on stage" to smaller social groups that allow students to creatively participate in the research themselves, he said."
Right on. This sort of experience currently isn't a given when someone walks into your office for an interview with a BS in engineering. We end up looking for folks that got this experience in extracurriculars, usually through a leadership role in a project like the solar cars or small satellites that a lot of universities are participating in.
Re:It takes both kinds (Score:4, Insightful)
No, a dickhead electrician will do that. And in the trades and professions, just as on
And there is the real difference between an engineer and a competent tradesman (be they electrician, technician, plumber, whatever). The engineer understand the reasons and applies their knowledge accordingly. The competent tradesman doesn't necessarily need to understand the reasons - they just need to appreciate that there are reasons, and that that's why they should follow the instructions / rules / practices.
And it does flow both ways - while the engineer knows the theory, they should also have an appreciation of any practicalities faced at implementation. By the same token, while the tradesman knows the practicalities, they should also have an appreciation of the engineering behind it all.
Many people misunderstand this. A good tradesman is equally as valuable as a good engineer, just in slightly different way in a slightly different domain.
Trade schools (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure both can program but who develops the sophisticated software that run super computer simulations?
The CS major. The other programming just write the supporting code usually. There are exceptions just
like everything else though.
Re:Trade schools (Score:5, Insightful)
Most likely the math or physics major. CS has become a joke, and most curriculum's resemble job training in Visual Studio.
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Re:Trade schools (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Trade schools (Score:4, Informative)
I think most of the top ten, twenty, or even thirty universities in the nation probably still teach academic computer science...
Example:
http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/classes-eecs.html#c
The CS9[A-Z] courses you see there are only worth one unit, not part of any required curricula, are self-paced, and are pass/no pass -- in other words, entirely optional and for the benefit of curious students.
The requirements for a degree in EECS at this university are CS61[ABC] and EE(CS)?(20|40). If you look at the upper division courses, you will see things like:
They don't seem like industry shills to me.
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Re: Trade schools (Score:2)
Some of us are wondering what your school's writing curriculum was like.
What does the market need? (Score:2)
The CS major.
How's about a modular approach? Let students choose what they think they need.
Why yes, yes it does (Score:2)
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The CS major.
Nonsense! I've found schooling has little to do with a coders ability.
Most coders I know who are extraordinary at the craft have a passion for it. If your interest in programming ends after you land your first job you're always going to be a shit coder.
Training happens on the job (Score:3, Insightful)
only the trade is teachable (Score:2, Insightful)
Beyond that, there isn't much the school can do. Either you're a thinker, or you're not a thinker. This isn't something for a school to teach.
The best you can ask is that high-reputation schools simply discard all the non-thinkers, so that a degree from one of those schools indicates that you are a thinker.
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I don't know about that. I'm a mech eng. One thing that bothered me about my university is that it pumped out tons of engineers who'd never picked up a screw driver and had no idea about things like torque patterns, wrench usage, or even which size of screwdriver to fit into various phillips (+) screw heads. Anyd my company hired them!
Those are things that they should have learned in school, esp since we have to design things for lots of people to
As a grad student at USC (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, what professor's teach you isn't so much how to code in Java or write PHP. What a professor teaches you (atleast the ones I've studied under here at USC) is how they (or other experts) tackled/approached engineering problems in the past, which IMO is more valuable.. in other words.. they impart more wisdom than knowledge. I think most good engineering schools would follow a similar pattern of teaching.
The program I graduated from ... (Score:2)
So, we were doing it 25 years ago, we still need to do it today, what have the schools been doing in the time in between?
Markets (Score:2)
Hands-On (Score:4, Insightful)
I graduated from an engineering university that focused on real-world hands on engineering. It has been my general observation that when it comes to taking a project from design to field implementation, engineers from theoretical schools tend to:
1. Not know where to start
2. Over design the project
3. Have a general disconnect between paper engineering and field engineering.
It may be a bit of envy, I still have to go back to my text book for the requisite math, but the hands-on guys seem to have an advantage.
Re:Hands-On (Score:5, Interesting)
END RANT
Re:Hands-On (Score:4, Interesting)
Those who want to have a generalist "thinker" engineering career can take a masters or Ph.D. in engineering. I think it's at that level that it makes sense to start broadening the theoretical view.
Problem (Score:5, Informative)
From the employer side, competition these days is as bad as it ever was, particularly from overseas, and justifies the need to think short term (someone who can fill a particular position NOW, rather than someone who can fill it a little later but arguably might be a better long term investment for the company).
This is not putting down trade-type training, and to those thinking of being critical of my stance... Consider this: Would you want a high school graduate fresh out of school installing the electrical wiring in your house? Wouldn't you want a trade with some education doing it? Wouldn't you want a well educated doctor operating on you that has had an additional two years of specialty training in some obscure area rather than a GP? Would you rather have someone who is trained to think in terms of more basic principles and math rather than someone educated only on the latest technology and gizmos?
The answer is that it ultimately depends on need: if a tradesperson will do, don't hire an engineer! And if you need to look beyond the current technology but need some serious thinking, don't hire a tradeperson!
Duh!
one of many problems (Score:2)
Wide Variety Wins! (Score:2)
They much more likely to find innovative solutions (though not "pretty" ones) and be innovators.
Employers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Leave them alone for a moment, think of the people themselves.
Most do not want to think for themselves and would rather do something mundane that pays the bills.
The percentage of people that actually want to think for their living is quite dismal in the grand scheme of things.
Secondly, look at who is more respected/has more resources in the society -- a "pop" star or a mathematician?
While the mathematician may be content with what s/he may have, society for the most part does not care about its "thinkers".
If we did, there would be far more folks out there doing things like pure mathematics, theoretical physics and other abstract areas that genuinely require thinking (not to discount the thinking in engineering and applied sciences, but pure sciences generally require more of a deidication than applied sciences and engineering).
So while engineering schools may be geared towards thinking, the question boils down to how many jobs out there require you to think as opposed to obey? How many people out there like people that think rather than do as they are told (while doing as you are told is certainly an important part of your learning experience, how many folks here have felt that they could find a better solution than the ones they have been asked to implement?).
No, if you want thinkers you need a society that encourages thinking.
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Genetics determines the limits, environment determines where an individual lies between zero and his limit. It's called norm of reaction. If those limits keep lowering, no amount of government focus on polishing turds is going to make us a nation of thinkers.
Re:Employers? (Score:5, Insightful)
The ones that keep teaching useless crap, will fail.
That's a very short-sighted perspective.
The Fourier series was discovered in the 1700s, and calculus before that, by people who thought they were doing pure sciences. Any applied value then? Nope, none whatsoever.
Ditto for boolean algebra, which came about long before we had computers.
The ones that teach in a modern way will succeed.
Care to define what "modern" is?
Why do we still teach CS and engineering majors tons of higher math? It's a vestigial remnant of what computers and engineering used to be about.
Oh, I do not know, maybe because most of _actual_ engineering is applied math? You should probably read up some papers on graphics, AI, game theory or theoretical CS -- it's almost entirely all math.
Today we have computers to do the math for us.
No, today we have computers to repeat and apply existing solutions to problems we have already solved. New problems? The human mind still kicks ass at pattern recognition and problem solving.
Universities will adapt or die. The ones that insist on teaching CS or engineering like it's just some subset of a math major will go away.
Most areas of CS and engineering are subsets of math and physics. Computer Science is more than writing some code, it's about mathematics, formal logic and other applied areas.
In fact, in the days to come, I'd imagine that CS itself is likely to breakup into smaller areas of focus.
Goodluck, though. Methinks you flunked math in school?
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Bull. Calculus was invented along with models for elementary physics. Everyone who cares about projectiles in warfare cares about elementary physics. The applications were plain then, in the same way that applications for semiconductor device physics discoveries are plain now.
Re:Employers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pythagoras, Euclid, etc were largely theoretical, despite that their later application. While newton's work was done hand-in-hand with physics, that wasn't necessarily true of Leibniz. Euler's work gets used everywhere, but a lot of it had no practical application at the time. Fourier's transform only became truly useful after the advent of the FFT. Riemann's work has ramifications in crypto.
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Let me offer a perspective as a practicing electrical engineer. This is a generalization, and not necessarily an accurate one. There's lots of applied math in higher levels of engineering (say, aerospace design), but down at the more applied levels it tapers off. I specialize in industrial control systems - primarily PLC systems. The closest I get to applied math on a daily basis is sizing a transformer, a fuse, a motor star
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Of all of the classes I took in college, my mathematics-heavy ones were by and far the most valuable.
Why? Three reasons.
1) I personally use it in my day-to-day jobs. Maybe I'm unusual, but I've been hired as a Software Engineer specifically because I have a stronger math background than most "CS" people.
2) Knowing a broad scope of higher mathematics helps me identify what might work and what might not work for a given problem.
3) The more
Doesn't matter. (Score:3, Insightful)
For a "thinker" that's motivated to become an engineer, the vast amount of learning will be outside of the classroom, and would probably take place whether that classroom was there or not. True, the right program will facilitate the development of such a person, but in the end, these people are naturally curious self-starters, and would probably succeed without a formal education anyway.
Then you have the people who go to school to put a check in a box, and who hope that getting the right qualifications on paper will land them a job. These people will do whatever is necessary to get the qualification, whether it be going to lectures, doing projects, what have you. In the end, they'll also likely succeed in getting a job, but they'll likely never be the creative types with new ideas, no matter how they were taught.
The difference is one of personality and attitude. It doesn't matter how you teach. Changing the curriculum won't change the people.
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It's a balance (Score:2)
But at the end of the program, it would be nice if you weren't completely useless to potential employeers. Part of that is going to be something approaching vocational training - learning a commonly used programming language in a computer science program. But to have both good thinkers produced and be vocationally useful, you need those programming c
Maybe some of both? (Score:2)
Funny you should ask (Score:2)
My vote is for someone who understands the fundamentals and how to extend them -- thinkers, in other words. Education, not training. The well-trained monkeys start out with a few months head start in knowing tools (if they're lucky) and after that fall behind for the rest of their careers. Before you know it their only options are Marketing and Management.
I'll second the unanimous opinion of the professors we spoke with at quite a few Universities when the bo
here's 2 examples (Score:3, Interesting)
Daniel Pink also addresses this issue from another angle in his book "A whole new mind" he asserts we will only move forward by combining both left-brain and right-brain skills. While I'm not 100% on board with all the things he talks about, I think his direction is right on point.
In Australia... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem has been that increasingly universities have been seen by consumers as a way of getting a job rather than as a pathway to higher learning as academia and thus there is expection by them, to be taught "practical" skills. I think a reason for this is there is a small stigma attached to technical and trade colleges as being "dumber" than their uni counterparts. I think in this way, the problem is that consumers do not really understand what the function of universities are.
How about choice (Score:2)
Nah. Lets just force everybody to do it the same way.
This article is spot on (Score:2)
Already are (Score:2)
Then there were those that did neither. A year or two ago, I had one graduate ask me to "clarify" the difference between AC and DC... There should be a mechanism to revoke degrees...
Happy Medium (Score:2)
The problem with teaching only a trade is that everything cannot be covered and even if it could be covered it would be obsolete before the student graduated.
What is needed is a happy medium where students get lots of theory but then are shown how to implement something real and tangible so these stud
Tradeschools and Universities (Score:5, Insightful)
The easy part: Trade schools graduate technicians, universities graduate engineers.
The hard part: Getting people to respect a good technician more than a bad engineer. Getting people to pay technicians what they're worth.
The likely outcome: Universities will continue to slouch towards vocational teaching that could have been done at the trades or in highschool. People will spend 4 years at mediocre state Us to avoid the stigma of not having a BS, which is the new highschool diploma. The masters will become the new BS.
My father had a GED. I've got a BS. If I ever have a kid, he'll probably need a masters to match his old man's career.
Hacker vs. Engineer (Score:2, Insightful)
bad summary of article (of course) (Score:2)
On the subject of "thinker" vs "tradesman", this is a somewhat silly argument. Any good engineering school will help you learn how to use your basic skills to attack problems while also giving you the tools to
Teach real problem solving...... (Score:2)
They've been taught the basics of engineering (general and the details for their fields), but most couldn't handle anything beyond a simple troubleshooting problem. What's really frustrating are those who have supposedly been trained in things like six sigma yet can't even throw together the simplest experimen
If everybody is "participating," where's progress? (Score:2)
I will say, I had a fairly "theoretical" based education -- BS in Physics and MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. Now the EE program at Stanford was *very* hands-off... I spent a day or two calculating (on paper) what an optimal caching strategy was for L1, L2, a
More process than product (Score:3, Funny)
Education is about inspiring each student to do their best. Point out the flaws in their work and challenge them to go beyond what they and others have done before.
Would be nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Creativity and "thinking" probably makes you advance faster once you have a job, or when you apply for your second job, but out of college, it's not the most looked for quality.
Disclaimer: I got a software job immediately after graduating in nuclear physics.
Tradesmen! (Score:2)
What the good engineering schools do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, once you get into upper level classes, you use those tools that you've acquired -- from classes or from elsewhere -- to accomplish tasks.
At least, from what I've seen. Who's taken a design class and been told what language they must write in? Unless you're forced to use an existing tool (ie, you MUST do your Computer Architecture work by extending simplescalar) or limited by the architecture (you can only choose between C and Assembly on most microcontrollers).
When I took my computer architecture class, we did trace-driven pipeline and cache models. I did mine in python; I was familiar with it from friends and I enjoyed using it. (I still do.) Other people used languages like Perl and Java, because that is what they were familiar with.
When I took video game design & programming, my group used Java for the client and C for the server. Other groups used tools like Visual Somethingorother or the Unreal engine (which was state of the art at the time). They chose tools that got them the product they wanted in the time they had. The team that wanted to do a "FPS Ultimate Frisbee" had great success with the Unreal engine. We had great success doing a multiplayer 2D board game using Java for the clients and C for the server. Partly because we were familiar with the tools and didn't have to fight them. Similarly, the person using Visual Studio wanted to make a DirectX game... and that was the right tool for the job. Writing a FPS from scratch in Java was clearly not the right option, nor was writing a 2D board game in the unreal engine. But the point was classical engineering of the kind that is most useful: given a set of resources (10 weeks in the quarter, a few University students with other classes, and only so many tools in the bucket), come up with a feasible idea and implement it.
Other schools have "computer science" programs where you learn linked lists and C++ pretty far along in your schooling (Junior year?), and you rarely (if ever) get free enough to design projects from the start. The difference is one of philosophy: using whatever tools available to accomplish the task you want to do, versus knowing tools to make things that someone else has mostly planned out.
It takes some of both kinds of people to make the world go around.
Most skilled trades (law, medicine) have secondary post-college programs entirely on top of arbitrary undergraduate degrees. It's a shame in a way that engineering gets crammed in with everything else; I think the secondary programs confer more respect on the people that go through them -- and a higher salary. If you had to get a Degree of Engineering on top of your undergraduate degree of choice, maybe engineers would have the respect they (IMNSHO) deserve.
Re: (Score:2)
Or put another way, submitter is falsely saying that you can learn how to think XOR how to implement things.
Should engineering schools... (Score:2)
I thought this was the job of business schools, no??
Teachable (Score:2)
Engineering Co-op Program (Score:4, Interesting)
Getting some type of engineering-related job while going to school really helps balance the book learning.
Definitely. (Score:3, Interesting)
You can also learn a lot of theory during co-op. I had a friend who was in constant danger of flunking out of EE; but got a good co-op with the Philadelphia Navy Yard. He'd flunk a class two terms straight, go on co-op, come back and fly through the class. Dealing with the circuits IRL taught him more than the books did.
Why limit ourselves (Score:3, Interesting)
If we think that both aspects - tradesmen and thinkers - are important, then we should train for both. I think the problem is that people focus far too much on what can be done in a 4-year program. Why are we limiting ourselves to those 4 years? An M.D. spends 3-4 years in a pre-med program, then 4 years in a medical school and then 3-7 years in residency. Why don't we increase the requirements to become a professional engineer?
We could keep a 4-year program at a University for the general background edcuation and any breadth requirements and then throw in a 2 year specialization program where you would learn the specifics of your engineering discipline. Once completed, you would go work at an engineering firm and complete a multi-year internship/residency/experiential program. This would allow a focus on "thinking" in university and picking up the tradesmen aspect at the engineering firm. I admit this would make education more expensive, and reduce the number of engineers, but it would probably create better engineers at the end of the program.
We could also change the titles so that completing the 4-year program makes you a General Engineer, the 2-year specialization a Engineer, (Computer Engineer, Chemical Engineer, etc.), and then a Professional Engineer.
If you aren't a thinker, Engineering isn't for you (Score:3, Insightful)
I won't say "thinkers are born not made" but relatively few people change from non-thinkers to thinkers after their high school years.
Anyone with a brain can learn a craft.
It takes a heart and soul to be creative. By age 18, almost everyone knows they have it or they don't.
Engineering is a mix of both.
Forget trade - let's deal with engineering. (Score:4, Insightful)
Engineering is a profession, and requires education not training. Let me rephrase that: a technical engineer deals with difficult equations. A good technical engineer deals with difficult analogies.
My main gripes with engineering education are two-fold:
- Only engineering design is taught, not engineering discipline.
- Writing skills are neither taught nor tested.
Real-world engineering requires the ability to communicate succinctly and, invariably, a very large amount of documentation.
If you want to develop as an engineer, you will need to understand how engineering, as group of people working together, works. This is where the discipline or practise of engineering comes in. (Sometimes knon as systems engineering) Unfortunately, very few undergraduate courses teach it and even fewer academics believe in it.
There are some notable exceptions (eg. Carnegie Mellon University), but that exception merely proves the rule.
binary fallacy? (Score:3, Insightful)
As ~2% of the posters wisely noted, the two major skill set classes are neither mutually exclusive, nor sufficient.
"Both" is a partially correct answer, but "Both and then some" is a more nearly sufficient approximation.
Emotional Intelligence, common sense, a firm grasp of the underlying economic realities, the ability to finely parse a marginal ethical dilemma into multiple shades of grey, the ability to communicate complex concepts with clarity to non-technical audiences, and many, many more aptitudes and attitudes are all relevant and contribute to the production of seasoned engineers, in any specialty. The existing academic establishment struggles with subject areas not math- or science-based. Rigor is not the exclusive province of the physical sciences, math, and engineering ( e.g.: cognitive neuro-linguistics ), but there are relatively few exceptional scholars in the liberal arts or social 'sciences'.
An irrepressible sense of humor wouldn't hoit, either.
Technical Comedy 483: "Ratbert as Doppelganger" MWF 0800-0815 3 cr.
As an educator.... (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Quit school
2. use the money you were going to spend on school (to pick a number out of the air, $3000 a semester x 8 semesters = $24,000) and spend that money on buying the fastest damn computer you can get your hands on, use your student discount which will be valid for the next 8 weeks to buy the software you want to learn, and then spend a pile of money on "how to" books.
3. use those books to learn how to do what you want to do.
4. Put together a kick ass portfolio, intern at the best company you can find nearby, and LEARN.
Do that, and you will learn all the button pushing you need to know. Remember, your portfolio speaks better than you do.
Now, if you want to LEARN SOMETHING, like CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS, and a REASON to do what you do, giving your life things like MEANING AND DIRECTION, then shut up, sit down and pay attention.
We will now learn our first three words in Turkish.
RS
Lazy Companies (Score:3, Informative)
Years back companies used to create apprenticeships and train their employees, you would be taught your basic programming and work related theory through there. It was a company's job to train you not the university's because universities and Colleges are for different things. Already (in the UK) the value of a degree has fallen a BSC degree puts you at technician level of jobs, a BEng will make you and Engineer and a MEng is for a charted engineer.
If you want 'tradesmen' then create an apprenticeship in your company for that trade, Universities exist to tech thinking and to further knowledge. I'm sick and tired of companies who won't invest in their employees (or prospective employees) and demanding the state do the job for them.
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Re:Engineers are not usually thinkers (Score:5, Insightful)
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They describe my physics grad school experience: small groups, collaborative, with a problem solving point of view.
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As for designing microprocessors, I don't really see how this is a good example, given that so many physicists are involved. Additionally, I am not saying that their are no hard engineering problems.
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Re:DEFINITELY AGREE (Score:5, Interesting)
Top engineering schools in the US [usnews.com] (in '05 cuz it was the first I found): #5 University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (public state school), #18 Princeton. If an A average at UIUC is worth a C+ average at Princeton, why is the ranking higher? Actually, don't answer that because I know about all the complications with school rankings.
I went to Pomona College and took computer science classes at Harvey Mudd, which is consistently ranked as one of the top non-graduate engineering programs. I didn't like the atmosphere out there and transferred to UIUC which is near my home. I have gotten good grades at both schools and can honestly say that it is more difficult to get an A at UIUC compared to the smaller private Harvey Mudd. The main reason for this is that the teachers are much more available and willing to help at smaller schools, while you generally have to figure everything out on your own at large schools. Larger schools are also much more likely to have classes that are intended to kill off the weaker students, usually by making the class very difficult, which again makes it hard to get an A.
That really doesn't matter that much though. The point is that you sounded like a jack ass. Troll me if you want, I just have a problem with people who think they are better because they go to a private school.
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At Cornell I found this was a function of the size of the department. The small departments tended to have professors who went out of their way to make themselves avaible, while the larger departments tended to make you work for it.
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That's a good analogy. Thanks.
Next time in an interview, after the prospect passes all skill things we need to verify, I'm going to look him dead in the eye and say (in my best Eastwood voice):
"Listen, we can see you've got the gun. But do you got the bullets?"
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I was camping at Mt. Washington once and a bunch of punks from Olin College were at the campsite next to me. There were a lot of them, about 20, and they seemed to have a singular mind. They all had a zeal for playing stupid campfire games that strongly implied "We are borderline in a cult. We will follow our leader to death. Our leader knows all. Our leader is divine." Lucky for us the leader wasn't there but the signs of brai
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What makes you think universities can change people that much?
It's a matter of focus. In education, there's only so much time to cover the material. So you have to decide what is most vital, and what the purpose of the course is.
People who are going to be thinkers aren't going to be ruined by learning specific technologies. People who can't think creatively will find ways to learn by rote no matter what you test them on.
I'd have to disagree here. Some people won't find ways to learn by rote, or learn at all, no matter how much creativity they lack. On the other hand, people who are creative may be distracted and lose their creative thinking by focusing too specifically - or they are so creative that they just can't handle thinking about specific "down to