Building a 21st-Century Renaissance Engineer

[einreb]

Originally Posted by Wayne at Pelican Parts

learn to program in Perl

why Perl? obfuscation? I've only dabbled in it (when forced), but it doesn't strike me a the language to learn.

From a 'practical' standpoint, I'd think that *gasp* VB/VBA would be the most generally useful.

Honestly, I don't think it matters... any programming language will help with logic and problem solving. I took FORTRAN and C and don't use either now, but it was a decent foundation to build from.

The original post is nothing new. There was a push to improve writing skills and mandatory ethics classes when I went through. There is a lot of tech stuff to cram into four years.

[legion]

I honestly think any programming language is fine. Once you learn one, it takes very little to pick up another one. From all 3rd generation languages on, they are pretty similar.

One big distinction is between procedural and object-oriented languages. Fortunately, you can usually write pretty procedural code in an object-oriented language.

And no, I don't know PERL. I know COBOL, VB6, and Aion. I could probably get going in Java pretty quick if I ever had the desire.

[MotoSook]

Never heard of PERL in the ~10 yrs of professional mechanical engineering life. We probably have a greater use for Visual Basic. Some experience in SQL, Access and a good understanding of Excel will go a long ways for the practical engineer. This is talking from an ME perspective. In college I took FORTRAN (hated every day of it) and C-language. Both were good foundations as Bernie stated. I now have to learn SQL for mining large databases.

I took a part time job in a machine shop when I was in college. Although it didn’t last long, I picked up some useful bits. I also participated in SAE. I was already a gear head before college, so I already started to gain some of the practical experiences I needed to be more rounded. I had a friend in engineering that wasn’t very mechanically talented. I remember laughing with him after I helped him change the oil in his car after which he jumped up and screamed, “Yes! I changed the oil in my own car!”

I keep going back to the thought that not all college students (more critically, engineering students) and their advisors have a far enough focus on their career. I think most students are just too busy or don’t have the foresight to see far enough down the road and plan for it. It probably doesn’t hit most students until the second semester of their senior year that they should be planning (really planning) for the work world.

When I was interviewing engineering candidates, I always looked for keys to how well rounded the candidate is. Most fresh engineering grads really don’t know anything about the job they are about to enter (they might think they do), so I looked for adaptability, enthusiasm, communication skills and their potential to interact with or integrate into a group of people. The little bit of experience they might have had from an internship or the one or two years on a prior job, are not that important if they can’t learn their new job quickly and grow into the position. I have never been one to hold experience in higher regard than someone’s ability to learn, adapt and act.

[onewhippedpuppy]

I was also forced to learn FORTRAN, and hated it with a passion. An advanced course in Excel, Maple, or MathCAD would have been far more useful. FORTRAN would have been handy 20 years ago.

[1fastredsc]

I had MatLab for programming, i've heard that it's a lot like C but the language is totally math oriented, but i've never programmed in C so i wouldn't know.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

In all honesty, to this day I'm ashamed I didn't take greater advantage of some of the classes offered by my alma mater. There were definitely some MechE classes I would have liked to take, except the pre-reqs in dynamics and thermo were out of the question with my CS and OR class loads. The mid-level EE classes also had some very intense projects (e.g., build a full-function calculator in a simulator) that could've been useful.

Talking about antiquated....the 'honors' intro to CS class that I took was in Pascal and the follow-up class in data structures used Scheme (LISP w/ OOP). C was taught as a 6-week pass/fail one credit course.

I, too, became something of a grudging MATLAB power user, which pissed off my QC professor as I insisted in using it instead of MINITAB to do my homework. Anything to annoy the administration.