suggestion for changes in engineering education

yagottabelieve
Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:11:23 +0000

I agree. I’m just not sure what that does for/against our reputation within society as a whole. Being an “apprentice” within your field kind of smacks of trade, rather than profession. If you went to more school like most other professionals do, would that change our image? Would we get paid more like doctors and lawyers? Would Mr. Scott finally get as much respect as the rest of the crew of the Enterprise? We may never know.



I don’t think apprenticeship is such a bad thing. In software engineering, there are a lot of employers who are unhappy with recent graduates, even if they have extensive backgrounds in principles and/or theory, because they don’t have enough practical experience. I hear about these types of complaints all the time - employers who feel that new graduates don’t have enough experience implementing code that does appropriate bounds checking (very important for security purposes), memory management, and error handling, to give a few examples. The code may be algorithmically efficient, but fails when subject to excessive loads, or causes the spread of unwanted traffic when compromised. Universities don’t always have time to teach this, and cover the principles and theory. Some people are lucky enough to get this in internships or summer jobs, but it doesn’t always suffice for making the jump to full-time work.

On another note, I don’t think it’s a bad idea for an undergraduate engineering degree program to take more than four years. I understand, however, that this would make such education prohibitively expensive for some people. In this regard we are behind lots of other countries that make quality engineering educations much more affordable, even if they take more than four years.