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Engineering School Grads - Tradesmen or Thinkers?
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)?"
I know Tufts is addressing it by asking engineering students to take classes outside their chosen area - to broaden them a little, but mostly offering courses that might help future grads benefit and or profit from their innovations instead of letting their employer take all credit and profit. (Things like learning a little about IP laws, how patents work, and how to apply.. ) All stuff designed to help the little guy.
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.
Get your tagline off my lawn.
I think in Australia traditionally you had technical colleges (such as TAFE) and Universities providing a clear difference in the direction of things being taught. Technical colleges producing "tradesmen" and Universities producing "thinkers".
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.
C+ average at Princeton = daddy was an alum and donated a lot of money while his son/daughter partied/sat around all through college.
Top engineering schools in the US (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.
I work for a structural engineer, and have for 6 years. I can count on one hand the number of times I have needed to know Calculus, or really anything past basic Trigonometry.
And in that one instance, there was a (slower) method of doing it via Algebra (important, since I was doing the calculation in Excel).
So Engineers don't *need* assloads of math. That said, I'm more of a tradesman than a thinker at my office.
God I'd love to be able to hire people with an ability to finish projects. That's why I refuse to hire CS grads. They're useless. The best programmers I hired had degrees in things like Russian Literature and Psychology (no shit). Theory isn't useless, but theory for the sake of theory is fucking useless. Same thing with the engineers. I've never gone wrong hiring an engineer who's a ham radio nut. However, most new engineers are useless. They're absoblutely incapable of building something. They're incapapble of picking standard designs and putting them together into something that will work without a ton of lab equpiment. Ham's however, have that part of engineering down.
END RANT
I agree. I work with some engineering firms, and these are businesses. They hire graduates of an engineering school with a view to employing them as engineers within the known scope of engineering. Adam Smith's theory of specialization is enhanced by efficiently producing effective specialized workers, not by producing generalist thinkers who need subsequent training to become effective engineers. (Ultimately mind you, there may be an argument that a generalist thinker will eventually produce more output than a worker; I don't know, personally) Thus, a vocational school has a definite advantage, and the working world requires more effective engineers.
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.
In Mechanical engineering it is good to have a hands-on project that have specific goals. At my University there are a few yearly projects you can sign onto (rocket project, ice arch, steel bridge project) but these are few, and only the ice arch is integrated with an course room instruction. I wish more projects like that were integrated with the curriculum and available. I expect to learn some similar structural information when I try to design and build my own cabin this summer.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
When I got my BSME, they had a great program called the Engineering Coop program (a quick Google suggests that its alive and well and available at various schools) that alternated semesters of school with semesters of work. I heartily recommend engineering students look into it. It does delay graduation, but the experience is great and the pay can be very good.
Getting some type of engineering-related job while going to school really helps balance the book learning.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Both. The best thinkers seem to be a combination: They were born thinkers and their skills were fine tuned by exposure to other thinkers (this is all an educational institution can actually do for you anyway, they just add structure).
The trouble with being all self-taught is that you don't get the community experience and you can end up with the most radical groups: Which is sometimes the way to go, but typically it's not. You might be a self-taught philosopher and immediately fall in love with the writings of Ayn Rand or some other psycho: This doesn't make you stupid, you have very little information with which to combat the psychosis of the author and so you end up won over by their arguments.
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.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
I'm an electrical engineer that specialized in analog circuits undergrad and RF for my masters. I use assloads of math every day.
Back in the day I went to Drexel because I thought co-ops would help me pay for school. They did, somewhat, but they also taught me how the corporate world works.
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.
Clear, Dark Skies
Mod parent up. Most of the folks that go to college for a degree of any kind are only going for the check box. Engineering students are no exception. Sadly it's not until graduation that they find out how unprepared they are for a career in the real world. The ones that actually enjoy engineering usually have a job in it before they go to college. Sometimes they even know more than the professors that are teaching the classes. I think that college should be for the academic/thinker types. I don't think that can happen until the high schools start stepping up and getting students prepared for a career rather than how to get into college.
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
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Exactly.
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 - you learn one job well, one "best practice" or technological innovation comes along and your entire skill-set is obsolete. In addition, because you've never been "taught how to learn" (which any decent education should teach you) you have a much harder time picking up again and getting up to speed with the new system/role/requirements/techniques.
Training gives specialists, and education gives generalists. Generalists are more flexible, but take time to become useful without oversight, whereas specialists are good at one thing but can quickly become useless or obsolete.
Given the only place you're really generally "educated" is in college/university, and pretty much all learning you'll get in the corporate world is tightly-focused training for specific jobs or skills, I'm in favour of university remaining mostly[1] "education" - it's pretty much the only place (aside from self-teaching, which requires the right student and teacher) where you still get educated these days.
Ideally, universities should provide education, turning out well-rounded generalists who can turn their hands to anything (and importantly, have had exposure to lots of different things so they already have some idea what they like doing). They should then be employed by companies who train them for the first year or so (possibly under some sort of mentor program) to do the job the company wants.
Companies, obviously, don't like this idea. They'd rather universities churned out generations of specialist, pre-trained drones they can plug into their structure without having to invest a day of training in them. This seems like a great plan, but it's the classic business-mindset shortsightedness - if your industry, methods, processes or techniques change (and they always do, especially in engineering and doubly so in computing/IT), you're swapping some small up-front convenience for a lot more headaches down the line.
Still, training expenses and lost man-days show up on management reports, and "time wasted because our developer doesn't know enough to follow good database design procedures" doesn't.
Graduates often don't like it because university hasn't prepared them for what companies are after - they're virgin developers filled up with neural networking theories and cutting-edge design methodologies, and all business really wants is someone with three years' experience to debug all the ratty VBA applications the secretaries in HR are now running the company on.
Pressure from industry (and graduates who feel like they've spent three years at university all for nothing) means universities are starting to become more training-oriented and less educational. Companies applaud this because they overestimate the inconvenience of on-the-job training and miss the indirect but massive benefits of having a well-rounded workforce.
Given universities are the last official bodies covering theory rather than practice and giving education rather than training, I think this is a bad thing.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself