<p>well, I have to disagree with engineer needing more liberal arts education. I am not attending a top school, so this may be only true for me. But engineers at my school have a hard time understanding math, few of them had fourier series, fewer know Bessel equations, even fewer know how to solve partial diffeq. They all scratch their head when taking transport phenomena and start copying off answer keys. They have a hard time doing simple matlab programming, most of them don’t know another programing language such as java or C++, or the concepts of object oriented programming. They can’t do modeling because they don’t have enough math and computer skills. They don’t take linear algebra because it’s not required, so they look at a 4 by 4 matrix and ask “is that absolute value?” If anything, engineers need more math and computer science. Right now engineer at my school only take mathj up to calc 4 (simple diff eq), and one simple introductory “hello world” computer class. Learning Shakespear won’t help the engineers to do their jobs.</p>
<p>Well, it kind of depends on the job. Many engineers find that they never need to solve another differential equation or use a Bessel function for the rest of their careers after they get their diploma and maybe pass their PE exams if they are in a field where that is normally done. 95% of what these folks do every day can be accomplished with the math they learned in high school. Unfortunately, all too many of the engineers with whom I have worked cannot write a cogent sentence or give an effective oral presentation.</p>
<p>idonotcare,</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>What sort of engineering program doesn’t teach its students these things? What sort of program would allow students to pass their classes not knowing these things?</p>
<p>PDEs, I can maybe see, but no computer programming or CAD? No Fourier series (isn’t that taught in diffeq?)? Looking at a matrix and having no idea what it is? These are upperclassmen, right?</p>
<p>I agree with BassDad that engineers need to know how to write and give presentations, though.</p>
<p>an ABET accredited Chemical Engineering school with a graduate program ranking among top 50th, apparently :)</p>
<p>When I got my BSEE (many years ago), they told us we were trainable as engineers, nothing more. To the engineering profs, it was a big deal that we had become trainable. It didn’t take long before I realized that we so far had learned very little of what we would need to know as engineers. Is this still the rule?</p>
<p>A couple of random thoughts on the prestige of the engineering profession, based on experience and observation:</p>
<p>1) It is pretty common to find people in other jobs which require little or no formal education taking the title “engineer” unto themselves: trash collectors are “sanitation engineers”, custodians are “custodial engineers”, repairmen are “maintenance engineers”, and in general we hear about “non-degreed” engineers or “technical engineers”. Of course this goes on openly and the general public seems to accept it. Possibly this is a nit, but I believe this robs degreed engineers of respect to some extent. As a contrast, try calling yourself a “non-degreed MD” or a “technical lawyer” and see what happens.</p>
<p>2) there is an old saying that “familiarity breeds contempt”. In the case of engineers, “commonness breeds contempt.” To see what I’m talking about, visit the “bullpens” at many large companies, large open spaces containing 50 or 100 10X10 cubicles, each containing a “highly-respected professional engineer”. No privacy, and oftentimes not even access to natural daylight. By contrast, at the same companies you will often see “administrative assistants” and other non-technical (“support”) types, with maybe high school educations, in nice private offices with good furniture and DOORS with LOCKS ON THEM.
And by the way, depending on the corporate culture, those professionals in the bullpens are often called “worker bees” (get it? pretty respectful, huh?). At companies less colorfully inclined, they may be referred to simply as “resources”. Of course, if business turns bad, they will be known as “excess overhead”. </p>
<p>3) Projects are broken down by program managers into individual tasks for scheduling and planning pursposes. A non-technical employee, say someone in purchasing, might get 4.5 days to do something routine like order material. An engineer, on the other hand, might be given 30 days to think up something that’s better cheaper than any that’s been done before, priove it out and finalize it. So, fill out a few forms or invent something: it’s all the same to the project scheduler.</p>
<p>4) engineering salaries start high, but people who stay technical will find that their incomes tend to grow relatively slowly and they are often overtaken by those in non-technical career paths.</p>
<p>5) someone earlier hit the nail on the head - good engineers derive personal satisfaction from the jobs they do, to a large extent regardless of the pay, organizational prestige or public recognition. Still, recognition and honest appreciation for what they know and what they can do would often be appreciated by the engineers I know and work with.</p>
<p>Good post Weldon, and all completely true.</p>
<p>I don’t need a door or office, more time to get my stuff done, a fancy title, or a ton of money. However, in this world, it seems those things are needed if you are going to get some respect.</p>
<p>That MSN Encarta link doesn’t seem right… it says that Atlantans have an average household income of ~40K.</p>
<p>[Atlanta-Sandy</a> Springs-Marietta, GA Metro Area - Selected Economic Characteristics: 2006](<a href=“http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ADPTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=31000US12060&-qr_name=ACS_2006_EST_G00_DP3&-context=adp&-ds_name=&-tree_id=306&-_lang=en&-redoLog=false&-format=]Atlanta-Sandy”>http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ADPTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=31000US12060&-qr_name=ACS_2006_EST_G00_DP3&-context=adp&-ds_name=&-tree_id=306&-_lang=en&-redoLog=false&-format=)</p>
<p>The median according to the census was ~56K, and for a family ~66K.</p>
<p>I work for an electric utility company and I have observed much of what Weldon is talking about. At the large plant that I worked at the engineering floor of the office building was cubicle city with no privacy because people are on top of you all day long to investigate problems, write reports, and calculate estimates for multi-million dollars jobs in one hour without having done any good research. </p>
<p>The work that is required to keep our aging power plants running is amazing but the technical people behind it don’t get much reward other than their regular paycheck. This year we worked very hard to finish a project in record time and all we got is a free lunch and a new coat. No bonuses this year. Just a “thank you for your hard work, now start working on the next project.” I don’t go to my job expecting to get showered with praise and extra rewards. My base salary and steady employment is all I expect.</p>
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<p>I have to disagree, as have others. The truth of the matter is that you just don’t need to know that stuff for most engineering jobs out there. </p>
<p>Let me give you an example. I know one former engineering summer intern who worked with a bunch of engineers and who was actually helping them with understanding basic calculus. Basically, one of those long-time engineers was trying to help his daughter learn high school calculus but couldn’t because he found out that he couldn’t remember it himself. Neither could any of the other engineers in the office. So he had to resort to asking the intern how to do it. </p>
<p>Now, to be clear, it’s not like those engineers had never seen calculus. Obviously they had all done quite a bit of it in the past. But, they don’t remember. Why? Because they never use it. You just don’t need to use that stuff to do the job, and consequently, you inevitably forget skills that you never use. </p>
<p>It has been said that what undergrad engineering curriculas are really preparing you for is a PhD program in engineering and a career in academia and research. Yet the fact of the matter is, most engineering students will never become academic/researchers. They are being forced to learn a boatload of topics that they just don’t need to know.</p>
<p>My experience was much the opposite. We learned a smattering of various engineering subjects, like mechanics of trusses, water flow, strength of materials, chemistry, physics, all at the basic level which have been invaluable to me throughout life (even as a home repair “engineer”), plus the EE core subjects which were directly applicable to job training. We were trained to go out into the world to do engineering. I found it to be perfect practical training. But certainly not all engineering schools are alike. We didn’t come close to academia or research; we learned nothing about everything.</p>
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<p>Vossron, I don’t know if your comment was directed at me, but even if it was not, I think I should clarify myself regardless. </p>
<p>It is certainly true that learning a broad range of engineering concepts is useful not just obviously on an engineering job but in probably any other pursuit you will undertake. Engineering as a discipline teaches you a highly rigorous and logical way of thinking that I believe is beneficial regardless of whatever career you might choose. </p>
<p>What I was specifically talking about in my previous post was the actual mechanisms and formulae that are taught within engineering curricula. These are the sorts of things that you rarely need to know in order to do the actual job. Very few engineers actually need to know to do their job how to derive the pages and pages of handwritten modeling calculus and differential equations that is typical of an engineering course. Those are the sorts of things you just don’t really need to know. Most engineering students learn it just to pass the exams and then promptly forget them because most of them will never see them ever again in their lives. Heck, some of the concepts are themselves so opaque that most students barely understand what is happening and all they’re trying to do is just hang on, hoping to pass. </p>
<p>For example, I highly doubt that many actual practicing chemical engineers use any of the chemical thermodynamics mathematics such as the Maxwell Relations or the Bridgman’s equations on their actual jobs. Heck, even a lot of engineering academics not only don’t use that stuff, they hardly even understand it. For example, I remember one girl who graduated with honors in chemical engineering from Berkeley and proceeded on to the Berkeley PhD bioengineering program was once offered a TA position in the ChemE thermo class, and she felt that she had to decline because she freely admitted that she did not really understand what was going on in that class back when she took it (even though she got a high grade in that class). ChemE thermo is one of those topics, like many other engineering topics, in which you can “well” and still not really feel like you actually understand what is happening.</p>
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Well, maybe they need to use this stuff occasionally. Son said that all of the engineers at his summer internship had a few of their college books on hand for reference. Maybe they don’t need to actually remember the details, but they know where to find the info.</p>
<p>I agree with sakky about math and computer science courses. I have yet to come across a situation where I needed more than what was already learned in math courses up to differential equations and intro CS. If I needed to program something, I was comfortable enough with just the background knowledge from the intro course and a reference guide. There was no need to go through everything there is to know about programming. </p>
<p>While adding more shakespeare won’t help, there are plenty of other non-technical courses that engineers would highly benefit from. For civil engineering as an example (and since I’m not familiar enough with the other disciplines to comment on them), I’d add the following before I add more technical courses:</p>
<p>Public policy - The single most influential factor in the civil engineering industry is the government. The better we understand it, the better we can lobby for adequate funding so that we can do our jobs, as well as to influence legislation regarding engineering practices. </p>
<p>Marketing - You think projects magically appear? Somebody has to be able to win jobs for all the engineering consulting firms. This is even more important for the smaller firms, because everybody has to contribute to keep the company running strong. It can’t hurt you at larger firms either. </p>
<p>Technical writing - I don’t think anybody doubts the importance of this.</p>
<p>Sakky’s also right about engineers not using much of what they learned in college in industry. I was chatting with the VP of the company I used to work for and he said he used maybe 5% of what he learned in school at work. Maybe that’s a bit extreme for the typical engineer, considering that the company was in a very niche field, but I imagine it’s not too far off in other fields as well.</p>
<p>Not all engineers want to go into industry or study technical writing or marketing or anything of that sort. Those that do can opt to take those classes. Some engineering students study it as a liberal art just for the sake of studying engineering.</p>
<p>That’s true also. I’m not advocating that these should be added, but that they should be added before more technical classes are added.</p>
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<p>One could use the same logic to question why all engineering students should be forced to learn engineering coursework at the tremendously technical and research-oriented style that they do now, when not all engineers intend to become researchers or academics. Those that do can similarly opt to take those classes as optional electives. But that’s not how it works now. As things stand now, students are forced to learn boatloads of material that most of them will never use and they know that most of them will never use it. </p>
<p>I think engineering program administrators really need to take a step back and ask themselves what is the baseline level of know that most engineers really need to know in the real world? That baseline - and only that baseline - should then be what is required. Everything else ought to be electives. </p>
<p>You could start off with a ‘unified’ lower-division sequence that covers all important topics as the baseline, but not in highly quantitative depth. For example, in ChemE, you could run a lower-division sequence of courses that acts as a combination survey of fluid mechanics, heat/mass transfer, thermo, separations, process control, and so forth. Those who actually become intrigued with, say, thermo and want to know more about it can choose to take the thermo elective. But it would be an elective. Those who don’t care about thermo should only have to understand the baseline and hence would be free to take electives on the topics that they actually do care about.</p>
<p>That is a logical and productive idea, thus they probably will never do it that way! :D</p>
<p>I have to say that there is a big difference between the CC “accepted truth” about engineers and my experience. I find the following to be true:</p>
<p>a. Engineers start higher and stay higher. They are in high demand, they can move between jobs when they get bogged down, they are offered positions of higher authority that include the need for technical understanding and experience and the ability to lead others. These positions come with higher salaries. The vacancies for engineers are huge. Most are not entry-level. I have three openings as we ‘speak’. </p>
<p>b. I have found engineers to be highly respected throughout the age range, in a wide range of domains, and for long periods of time. I respect engineers. I know what it takes to be one. Everybody I know professionally thinks the same way. Engineers are the modern-day wizards. </p>
<p>c. While it may be true that you use relatively little of the actual course work from college, we still need people who will not shrink from technically and mathematically complex problems. To be useful to us, you need to be able to absorb a significant amount of domain-specific knowledge. The only way to determine if you can is to let you try with a ‘training set’ – undergraduate engineering. Pass that and you’re much more likely to succeed in my business than a business major. </p>
<p>d. You will need to know more statistics than you ever thought you would. Colleges teach far too little of this, along with experimental design and, as mentioned, writing.</p>
<p>e. People who are not risk-takers should avoid engineering. This field requires a self-confidence that will move you past several failures and mistakes. If you’re waiting for the government to drop by and help you out, become a ________. (You fill in the non-engineering field.) </p>
<p>f. Keep your skill-set current. The horror stories come from those people who believe their degree is a credential. It is not. It is only an entry to a life-long adventure of learning, failing, changing, succeeding, and, eventually, leading.</p>
<p>From all of the engineers among my family and friends, I have found (a) and (b) to be absolutely correct. Also, (f) is also unfortunately correct in some cases. I have known a few engineers who did not improve themselves/keep up/advance and thus did not have many options when they needed to go job hunting in their 40’s or 50’s. There’s a lesson there somewhere!</p>