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hellousdad · July 8, 2005, 1:37pm

Few of my kids seniors who have gone to prep school and are enrolled in top Colleges have suggested this phenomenon their many friends. Do you think it is a right assessment? I think many young people are realizing that focusing on math and science does not give them too many opportunities in career advancements. They need to improve their communication skills through mastering history and getting a command of English language. Even in the industrial organization despite being intelligent they are short changed in career. The problem also comes at time of promotion that people with better communication skills get better results. A person armed with professional degrees such as law or MBA end up moving past ahead of a person who is technically savvy but with limited command of the languages. In addition, even in the investment business field people with economics degree with better communication skills get promoted over a person who is analytical but lacks communication skills. Thus many new generation kids are channeling their energies towards acquiring better analytical and communication skills over knowledge of science. According to them these points were raised by someone as prominent as an MIT administrator. What does parent think about it? This is the prime reason why many HYPS kid outperform the kids in MIT or Caltech. Do you think their assessment is right on the money?

yulsie · July 8, 2005, 1:41pm

You need both for career advancement, unless you are a genius who invents a truly “Better Mousetrap.”

marite · July 8, 2005, 2:09pm

You need good communication skills whatever the career you choose, but career advancement depends on other factors.
Many engineering types don’t like to be managers or entrepreneurs. They are more entranced by problem-solving than making tons of money or negotiating with bosses and co-workers.

mootmom · July 8, 2005, 3:08pm

? Excuse me? Outperform in what way? My son is starting at MIT in the fall and the incoming class is anything BUT low-skill in communications or interpersonal skills. I am very impressed with the breadth of abilities and interests in the many MIT students I’ve met: they are very highly accomplished and focused in scientific areas, but that’s by no means all they are good at.

Problem-solving is important in any profession. Learning how to think and analyze is a critical skill for everyone, along with communicating the results of that thinking. Don’t sell these top schools short in terms of the wealth of skills their students are graduating with. (And PS: it might not be appropriate to lump MIT and Caltech together, they have their similarities but also their BIG differences.)

Or did I totally miss the point of your post?

ellemenope · July 8, 2005, 3:42pm

By out-perform, I think the poster was talking about how high kids advance in any company. I remember reading an article about MIT where some MIT person mentioned the cliche that MIT kids may be smarter than Harvard kids, but MIT kids often end up working for Harvard kids. MIT didn’t like that and was working to change that.

But the problem is as Marite states–if you stay in the technical end of a company (as many engineers and scientists do–after all, that is what they love), you will only advance so far and may end up working in a company headed by a HYPS kid. In that way, HYPS kids will “outperform” MIT kids.

But I think that is changing–with the start up biotechs, scientists are getting more used to being businessmen and entrepeneurs. I don’t know if there is the similar thing going on in the engineering field.

EllenF · July 8, 2005, 3:46pm

The communications skills of most engineering students are comparable to those of most liberal arts majors. While I wouldn’t discourage engineers from taking history and English language courses, I don’t think it is necessary to build their communications skills. I wouldn’t be surprised if engineering is the most frequent undergraduate major of managers at the nation’s largest corporations. Those people wouldn’t have reached those levels without an ability to communicate. BTW, many engineers do pursue MBAs after they begin working. And many others take in-house management training courses.

As others have noted, some engineers don’t wish to pursue management. That doesn’t mean these engineers necessarily have poor communication skills. They may prefer design or research. Design and research don’t take place in a communications vacuum!

So, no, I don’t think the message was correct.

xiggi · July 8, 2005, 5:29pm

Sixty years separate the two quotations. Show what happens when people do not “think” improvements are needed.

<a href=“Colorado School of Mines | A Premier Engineering University”>Colorado School of Mines | A Premier Engineering University;

"Some years ago, Sir James Barrie remarked that, the Man of Science appears to be the only man who has something to say just nowand the only man who does not know how to say it. 

While this lament is too broad a generalization to apply to every scientist or engineer (many of whom are renowned communicators), it is sufficiently incriminating that it should concern many of us. 

Limited written and verbal communication skills can severely hinder professional growth in management or in engineering." 

One of the most common abuses of language among engineers is Merrills second principlethe use of verbose, vague, and pompous language. There is a tendency among engineers to overuse technical jargon. Jargon is composed of three distinct language types:

Confused or unintelligible language (some forms of outrageous modern slang, for instance)
Technical terminology or idioms
Obscure-pretentious language and phraseology

And <a href=“http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/articles/brief/06eng_brief.php[/url]”>http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/articles/brief/06eng_brief.php</a>

Poor Dilbert 

Armed with only a pocket protector and a skinny strip of a tie, this sad little engineer makes his way through a bewildering corporate workplace, socially clueless in a nerd-hostile world. Sure, he’s just a comic strip character, but in engineering education, Dilbert represents the problem. “He’s the stereotype that engineers have been saddled with forever,” says Albert Gray, executive director of the National Society of Professional Engineers. “People have an idea that engineering students just retreat in the corner with a calculator and do math problems competitively.”

It’s an image (and sometimes reality) that engineering schools and professional societies across the country have been trying to combat for the past several years. In its 2000 standards, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology addressed nontechnical criteria for the first time, calling for “an ability to communicate effectively” as a crucial part of an engineer’s education. Meanwhile, schools of engineering have been introducing courses and new degrees aimed at teaching nascent engineers the “soft skills” necessary to apply their technical expertise successfully. “Historically, schools have educated students to be very strong technical experts, but they’ve graduated without a broad understanding of the implication of technology or of business issues,” says Thomas Magnanti, dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It’s not that engineers lack innate social skills; it’s just that it can be hard to understand what those skills have to do with engineering. “Engineers tend to really believe that they’re going to let the work speak for itself,” says Jim Chow, who graduated from the Leaders for Manufacturing program at MIT in 2004 and is now a senior manager in technology alliances at Siebel Systems. “But half the battle is convincing and persuading people that this is the right thing to do. I’ve seen my peers have amazing ideas of new theories that just get lost because they couldn’t communicate the ideas well.”

Disconnect. Traditionally, businesses in the market for engineers didn’t care much about nontechnical skills. An entry-level engineer would be hired to solve a narrow and specific problem that he would work on in solitude. Even now, there exists a disconnect between the skill set an engineer needs for a successful career and the qualifications that get him hired in the first place. “The recruiters pick the people with the most technical courses because they’re trying to fill a particular job in a particular team,” says William Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering. So students tend to bulk up on technical skills at the expense of broader coursework.

But these days, engineering is typically practiced in teams with several engineers from different disciplines who work with contractors, business people, and sales and marketing personnel. New hires who can’t adapt may find themselves out in the cold. “The problems are typically not on the technical side,” says Linda Schnell, who directs university partnerships and internship programs for Cadence Design Systems, a $1 billion Silicon Valley electronic design company. Rather, what gets that new grad fired is the inability to communicate and adapt to workplace culture. “You have to be able to talk with people, interact, be worldly, read the daily newspaper, know how to conduct yourself at a cocktail party,” says Daryl Chubin, director of the Center for Advancing Science and Engineering Capacity at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Students who haven’t developed those skills “find themselves to be outmoded people in five years,” says Chubin. “They’re dumped out because they’re too expensive, the half-life of their knowledge has eroded, and a brand-new hire will be cheaper and more up to date.” Factor in globalization, and that new hire might be cheaper still if the job is outsourced to India or China.

ohio_mom · July 8, 2005, 5:39pm

From my experience, engineers/scientists are pretty good at communicating with others of their ilk regarding technical issues. Communication with non-engineers is another matter.

Alumother · July 8, 2005, 6:09pm

The issue is usually one of interest. Trying to get engineers to find people, and groups of people, and managing people, as interesting as they find technical problems. I personally, from my vantage point, would still urge any young person with an interest to go right ahead and get the technical undergraduate degree. The people stuff you can figure out in the real world, engineering requires a foundation that is hard to pick up later in life.

atomom · July 8, 2005, 6:59pm

Quote from essay, “Blinding Science” by John Derbyshire in 7/4 National Review:
“The arts and humanities are not mere entertainment, to be turned to for relaxation after a busy day spent solving differential equations; they are our templates for living, for governing ourselves and our societies. Nor can science offer any help with the knottier problems besetting the human race. It can remedy bad smells, bad pains, and bad roads, but not bad behavior, bad government, or bad ideas.”

Hmm. My H and I were LA. Our son is a techie. We want him to have a broad education; he disagrees. Of three engineers in my family, the one with a managerial position/high salary is the one who was involved in speech and theater–better communication skills. Many engineers have terrible people skills. Stereotypes are true. However, the top tech schools only admit people with high math AND verbal scores.

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