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)
I think ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Both (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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.
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.
Engineers are not usually thinkers (Score:1, 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.
Myself, I go for tradesman (Score:1, Insightful)
In any case, now I realize that big-picture knowledge growth is a constant and can come from self-study, so better start with tradesmen approach to pay enough bills early to get to the maturity of the 'thinkers' phase.
Re:Trade school then engineering degree (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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.
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:Engineers are not usually thinkers (Score:5, 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:Engineers are not usually thinkers (Score:1, Insightful)
For an example.. you know those things called microprocessor-chips inside your computers.... yeah.. Engineers design those.. not physicists or mathematicians. And I think you can not design those without having the ability to think.
Re:Trade schools (Score:2, Insightful)
The education system. (Score:2, Insightful)
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 an economical way that results in low costs and labor times but still incorporates enough inspired design work to make the product easy to maintain and scalable when it is time to develop it further. I'm a software developer myself and I see all to many engineers who threw away all sorts of things they learned in design classes in school such as UML, in favor of (badly) writing undocumented crap-code; and keep in mind that writing crappy code *badly* is quite an achievement. I'd for example like to see a teaching system in say, Software Engineering or Comp. Sci. where students are made to develop some software during the first term and then develop it further the second term adding features and complexity. They would quickly realize as the project becomes more complex why things like clean, well structured code UML diagrams code documentation and good initial design are important. That way if they wrote a crappy app during first term just to pass the term it would come back to bite them. That's what happens in the real world if you do bad design it bites you in the balls later.
The problem of spoon-feeding people knowledge is actually much more widespread than just Engineering courses. Even at primary school level kids are spoon-fed mathematics and physics knowledge but rarely given the task of solving real world problems that would make them realize that this knowledge is actually good for something. I served mathematics like a jail sentence until my first year of Engineering school when I was finally put in a position where I had to actually use it to do interesting things which made me realize that this 'boring crap' was actually pretty useful stuff that's used absolutely everywhere.
</rant>
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?
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)
Re:handle (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 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. I got on as a laborer, and I got some people in my class jobs there, too. We learned far, far more about house construction by getting a minimum-wage hammer-throwing job than three courses costing in the thousands of dollars.
Enginnering courses (particularly civil and building) NEED apprenticeship / co-op / hands-on approaches, because I know a lot of ythe people in my class got jobs.... and I don't want to live in anything they designed.
Re:Doesn't matter. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Both (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Employers? (Score:2, Insightful)
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:only the trade is teachable (Score:2, Insightful)
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 build. If we can't build a functional/reliable prototype ourselves, then who is?
The problem is you CAN get that job with no experience. When working on space/aero applications you NEED this.
Many universities aren't giving this. Mine didn't, it was only through my own motivation that I took classes that allowed me to work with the 2 profs who believed that this kind of training was necessary. Others thought multivariable differential equations were more important.
Re:handle (Score:2, Insightful)
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: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: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.
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.
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.
Re:I think ... (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to teach both what current solutions/tools/methods are, as well as processes for solving problems. People need both, one to enter, the next to adapt. Unfortunately in 4 years, that's a lot of stuff to absorb and college is too expensive to make the programs longer. My solution is to drop all the general ed crap no one needs, and allow students to focus more heavily on what they came there for. A lot of the "tradeskill" knowledge can be taught in the first two years of education, while the pure math/science coursework is occuring that provides the foundation for the "thinker" training that necessarily needs to occur later on. Further, it provides a much clearer feedback mechanism when you've done a "tradeskill project", went through the pains and the confusion, and then start getting hit with the "thinker" knowledge. It's a lot more obvious how you can use advanced analytical skills to solve a problem you have RIGHT NOW, than to listen to all this information being poured at you about how yesterdays problems were already solved.
Re:Both (Score:3, Insightful)
Career centers tend not to be too helpful, from my experience, since they are trying to focus on many different majors and goals, so they tend to give generic advice you can pick up from anywhere. Departments should provide an individual who will work with undergrads to get this connection with the industry. Advisers are a hit or miss method as there is no check to see if they actually can advise.
Re:I think ... (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, 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 necessity a lot more before investing in that kind of effort).
Re:It takes both kinds (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:handle (Score:3, Insightful)
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 to do. A civil engineering degree is EXTREMELY flexible. You can work in hydrology, structural, transportation, land development (my field), etc., etc. All very different fields that share the same civil engineering base.
Physicians aren't expected to go into surgery after a 4 year undergrad degree - why would you expect it to be different for any other profession?
Dawn, P.E.
Re:Trade schools (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:handle (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 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 are highly encouraged (we have about 80%-ish of 3rd years apply to internship this year). It's during the experience phase that you learn the meat of what you need to know.
Without the knowledge base you don't have an engineer, you have a technician. The knowledge base is what defines the engineer. Plus, engineering grads [ucalgary.ca] get a lot of research done, and you can't do useful research unless you have taken all the basic courses first!
Re:Employers? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why teach Math??? Are you an IDIOT??
As an electrical engineer, I can tell you that the only way to model electrical circuits is with math. You can't SEE electrons or electromagnetic waves, you have to use mathematical equations to model how they're behaving. In power circuits, you have to understand inductive, resistive, and capacitive circuits, or a combination of all them. Calculating the available short circuit at a fault on a power grid so that the necessary protective devices can be sized properly uses a complex array of equations using real and imaginary numbers. Yes, it's true that computer programs and calculators do the number crunching nowadays, but a practical knowledge of the equations and their calculations is essential to make sure that results are correct, or if there isn't some sort of error in data entry.
Sizing a motor so that it can drive a rotating load, or designing the circuit to control the motion of that load all involve using variations of E=IR or F=Ma, and even PV=nRT, for that matter.
And that's true to some degree even in the most lowliest of trades. I've noticed that the very best craftsmen, electrician, millwrights, pipe fitters, welders, machinists, etc, are the ones who know how to THINK, and have an understanding the theory behind what they do.
Engineering is solving problems, whether it's the problem of how to keep power grids more reliable, or how to make widgets more economically and faster and quicker than the competition, or how to build bridges to cross longer spans. Sure, some problems aren't very glamorous, like how to best pump raw sewage, or how to make sanitary napkins be more absorbant, but they're problems that need solving nonetheless. Engineers need to be thinkers to figure out how to solve problems, but their tools are based on the foundations learned in academic theory classes such as basic math, calculus, physics, and chemistry. Best of all, these same classes that teach theory also happen to teach students how to think their way through problems.
As for all the "practical hands-on" stuff that engineering students think they're missing out on, well those are all just details that only take a couple of years on the job to learn. Those details are frequently specific to the type of industry that students move into. Manufacturing, construction, or product development are examples of types of industry with very different ways of practicing the craft of engineering, and it would not be very cost effective for Engineering Schools to try to train all engineers on the myriads of specific practices employed by all industrial sectors.
(Well, you never really do learn it all. Your whole career will be spent learning and learning, so if you don't like learning, go into sales or be a street sweeper or something.)
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: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.
Re:If you aren't a thinker, Engineering isn't for (Score:1, Insightful)
There's a book out there called "Young Geniuses and Old Masters," which talks about two roads to accomplishment.
Some people have flashes of brilliance early on, good for them.
Available to the rest of us is the development of mastery.
Mastery does not come from getting an MEng, it takes developing a skill for a full decade. The people that dive right in to make it work, that will get their hands dirty and have the work ethic to get it done, I'd hire them bottom to top over chalkboard wonders like me.
Re:Both (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Missed the point entirely (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:handle (Score:3, Insightful)
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 out.