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Engineering School Grads - Tradesmen or Thinkers?
Posted by
Cliff
on Thu Jan 18, 2007 07:20 PM
from the do-we-want-our-graduates-in-or-out-of-the-box dept.
from the do-we-want-our-graduates-in-or-out-of-the-box dept.
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)?"
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I think ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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, wh
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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.
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.
Re:Trade schools (Score:4, Insightful)
Training happens on the job (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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!
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.
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?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 o
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Engineers are not usually thinkers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That's a good analogy. Thanks.
Next time in an interview, after the prosp
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ef
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.