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Fully Endowed FW Olin College of Engineering Opens
olin01 writes "USA Today has a story on the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, which opens this Friday to its freshman class. Olin's goal is to graduate students who are "renaissance engineers," meaning that not only do the have the technical knowledge and skills but also a strong understanding of their context through studies in arts, humanities, social science, and entrepreneurship. This past year, 30 "pre-freshman" worked with faculty, staff, and administration to create the college's curriculum and student live programs. Olin also gives a full tuition scholarship to all admitted students, more information on their website."
#1: Engineers don't take any other courses (from what I've been seeing) besides the engineering courses. No history, humanities, fine arts, etc. It makes for a more well-balanced person. It should be required.
#2: From the engineering programs I've seen lately, it seems as though they're shoving a bunch of formulae at the students and are saying "Here, memorize these." without explaining/proving how/why they work. That is vital. The engineers being churned out now are book smart, cannot apply their knowledge, and do not know where their "knowledge" comes from.
This is why I switched to physics. Generally the same material, except more in depth/proven/etc.
At my BS school, they cut optics out of the physics classes because "Engineers don't need that". What's up with that?
Mike
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
olin01 writes "more information on their website."
/., at least be straight with us. We're smart enough to see through it.
Their website, or yours? If you're going to advertise on
Will be interesting to see how this school grows.
Say hello to zMac.
I agree. The whole concept is exactly what Harvey Mudd set out to accomplish in 1955.
The mission of HMC ("Harvey Mudd College seeks to educate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians well versed in all these areas and in the humanities and social sciences so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society.") seems the same, as well as the class size (~650), and naming convention (moniker taken from rich donor). The biggest difference seems to be the price. And the fact this school has yet to form a reputation for excellence.
Free tuition and housing. Sounds like a tasty deal!
Makes you wonder if there's an agenda. What kind of grads will this place really churn out? How does the college pay for its operations? There's some big bucks involved: A $400 million pledge from the FW Olin Foundation. (Not my intention to sound critical -- but if, say, Microsoft were to sponsor parts of a university program, it does raise eyebrows...)
I guess my question is, how will the market value (the holder of) a free degree? I scraped through countless crap jobs and jumped through inane scholarship hoops to pay my way through. Guess I feel a bit jealous.
Can't get to the site, but it sounds exactly like the program I graduated from. I was in the first graduating class, and I have to say if it wasn't for this program I would have never finished my engineering education.
The Engineering and Society program at McMaster is a 5 year program instead of the usual 4 for a standard engineering degree. You still "belong" to a particular branch of engineering (chemical in my case), but you spread the technical portion of your education over the entire 5 years, freeing up time for other areas of study. I studied anthropology and philosophy outside of engineering, as well as a number of targetted Engineering and Society courses on social impacts of technology, environmental issues, history of technology, etc. And these were far from bird courses, critical thought was stressed and the work load was high. Math and physics were for the most part easy for me, defending my arguments critically was hard. But it is the skill I took from university that I am most proud of.
For me, it was the best education I could have had. I'm good at the technical part, and always wanted to have a career in engineering. But I always had in mind that sometimes technology doesn't always make the world a better place. I think that as engineers, we need to have a broader world view of how what we do affects the world around us. Both the human societies and environment. Engineering education requires a huge amount of content, and in order to pack it all into 4 years, there isn't much room for anything else.
I think that anyone looking to get into engineering should look closely at programs like this, the extra year may seem like a lot now but the rewards in the end may far outweigh it.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
School of Engineering is different than School of Arts and Science/Letters and Science.
... Man, my parents forgot the check for my books."
They have less general education requirements. At UCLA they only had to take 8 units of non-School of engineering classes. That's TWO classes.
They studied about 5-8 hours a day, never got laid and rarely showered. These guys needed to be saved from themselves by showing them women (yes there are a few women in engineering but they're widely underrepresented) getting them to understand the world can't be solved by an equation or logic. And for God's sake, get them to know at least an iota of what they love to argue about with economics, psychology and liberal arts majors.
Examples (All of these are true things said by engineers in my presence.)
"All communism is evil. A free-market economy is what is best for the world...Bill Gates is evil."
"Women are evil. Here's a proof explaining it."
"All people should pick themselves up by their bootstraps and make their own way in the world.
Keep fighting the good fight, mhore!
c.
The Existential Pleasures of Engineering by Samuel C. Florman was required reading when I attended the College of Engineering at the University of Florida. A detailed look at engineering as an art form. Highly recommended.
At the UW, the honors program requires you to take any 3 year-long sequences to graduate (along with whatever major you're doing). These include:
I choose the first three. Out of world civ, for example, I got to write a 50-page paper on pyramids, study west African feminist literature, and take a really interesting course from a femini-Nazi women's study professor.
Now, while I'm coding OS thread tasks, I can also appreciate a bit of Herodotus (or whatever else tickles your fancy) while taking my breaks. So if you're interested in a well-rounded education, check out your school's honors program.There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
The second red flag comes from the wording: "Creating a curriculum"? That smells like they haven't been accredited yet.
As an Anonymous Coward has already posted, they're not. Two of my friends considered being part of that pre-freshman class last year, and it was made very clear to them that the school was not yet accredited, but would hopefully be in 5 years before the first class graduates. Neither of them wanted to risk that.
I agree. I have a math and physics BS and over the 5 year course of attaining it I ended up taking 1 communications class, 3 english classes, 2 foreign language classes, 1 history, 1 sociology, 1 anthropology, 2 psychology, 3 philosophy, 1 music, 1 art, and who knows what else. That's 16 classes, so figure 48 semester credit hours.
My friend with a history major only needed one math at the precalculus level (and he took calculus in high school) and one sequence of lab science, which he took geology or whatever the cryp science is at our university.
I don't think everyone needs to be trained scientists. And I do not think that everyone has what it takes to get through an entire year of calculus without taking a hit to their GPA, but a liberal arts education is unbalanced.
Perhaps a good measure of how unbalanced the US education system is, is the general GRE scores. Scientists and engineers generally do exceptionally well in the logic and analytic, and moderatley well in the verbal. While english majors do average in the logic and analytic, but only slightly better than the scientists and engineers in the verbal. You would think that the differences in the two disciplines' specialties wrt each other would be the same, but they are not even close. The scientists scores come out much higher over all. This indicates that either our educational system is unbalanced or the GRE is.
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