Building a 21st-Century Renaissance Engineer
 

This falls in-line with a recent post...

Awesome. The engineering curriculum is in dire need of an overhaul. I'm finishing up my aerospace engineering degree this spring, and many of my fellow students couldn't find an altimeter in the cockpit if you paid them. Engineering is not applied math, but most schools teach it as such. Therefore, you scare off most of the creative kids with pure theory (math), and graduate a bunch of human calculators that couldn't build an airplane out of Legos. There is ZERO emphasis on independent thought, creativity, or problem solving.

I did a full apprenticeship which meant I had to do real work as well as complete my academic qualification before I got a full time position. So in addition to regular college I had to spend three months in every engineering based department of the company doing everything from component design to plant maintenance.
The downside is that it takes far longer before you get into a real job with full pay, but on the otherhand the company did pay for my schooling.
I have found to give me a far clearer understanding of engineering and the day to day requirements of the real world than most 'normal' graduates. I really don't know why more companies don't do similar schemes.

After I read "dissing" in the article, the author loss credibility with me. :(



The new schools sounds great, but are they an accredited school?


As for other engineering programs, they do offer electives. Those electives were meant to provide an opportunity for developing a well rounded student. Do advisors think about this? My advisors in engineering school were all engineering professors, as they should be, but they ARE after all academic engineers. So the process isn't perfect.

In college I sought my own well rounded development with electives in art history, ancient civilizations, economics, earth sciences, foreign languages and other liberal art courses that fit the schedule. No one told me to do it, certainly not my engineering advisors, but I had an interest in learning those things.

Engineering advisors (+ students and parents) need to be trained to think about the outside world, and all it's layers.

I was recently in a meeting with my niece's high school advisor. When I suggested classes that I felt my niece needed as an elective, the advisor pretty much shot them down. My niece was living in and is living in a bi-lingual household. With parents that spoke broken English at home, I felt my niece needed English or literature classes to better prepare her for college. I came from the same environment and felt I was at a disadvantage on this front when starting college.

The advisor admitted that she had not considered challenges for children from bi-lingual households, yet she was quick to brush off my suggestions. I had the uneasy impression that the advisor was limiting my nieces potential by suggesting traditional electives that she felt high school girls should take. I wasn't impressed. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised since I noticed a 12 inch+ tramp stamp on the advisor's lower back as I was entering her office!
:mad::(

This was something that i actually forgot to mention in my other thread related to this subject. My professor of senior seminar who is also our department head thinks it's possible that the entry level Engineering degree may get lengthened in the future. He said it's one of the only majors of it's type that has gone 100 years without any changes to it's core curriculum. It kind of makes sense considering there is barely enough time to stuff in a little of every topic we are expected to understand in a 4 year BS. I wouldn't be surprised if an entry level engineering degree gets extended one day with an extra year or two worth of business classes and the like.

"He said it's one of the only majors of it's type that has gone 100 years without any changes to it's core curriculum."

I think your Prof needs to do some additional research.

Ask him if he thinks they were teaching gas dynamics (compressible flow - jet engines, rocket engines, shock tubes, etc.) in 1908. I also doubt there was much discussion of finite difference, finite element and other numerical methods (Runge-Kutta, etc.) in 1908. They couldn't have discussed a Thevenin equivalent as it wasn't even in use by the EE's in 1908. All of these were part of the core ME curriculum at NMSU in 1975-1977. Some of the core curriculum better not change or one will be graduating some sorry mechanical engineers. However I agree the curriculum will likely need to extend to five years of courses; MIT has sort of done this to put some of the hardware and hands-on design courses back into the education of their engineers. I believe they then graduate them with a master's degree.

Jim Sims, BSME, NMSU 1977

I thought this Thread was going to be about Lubby getting his Dick hard, and poing his wife..

Where are these kids going to school? JimBob's Engyneerin' Academy?

But can they make the trains run on time.

Any/every accredited school in the USA. Accredited means it meets certain standards and norms, which are in many way responsible for the theory first approach. Considering the failure to meet this status-quo, I'd be willing to bet this program is not accredited. I am 4 credit hours short of an AE degree at one of the better AE schools, and thus far I have used maybe 5% of my education. The rest of it is useless, ancient theory, "foundation" courses. Of course, the only foundation they lay is for grad school, not a real career.

Do they teach you how to ring the bell too. Ding Dong, Ding Dong, Ding Dong..how exciting it all must be!

I think what he was trying to say is that the base hasn't changed (x amount of credits stuffed into 4 years), what your talking about is the technical advancements. I assume what he was getting to is that we need to add more to the core curriculum of a base engineering degree. I say this because i get the feeling sometimes that they are trying to stuff too much material into a 4 year BS, sometimes it seems like there are topics that get rushed through but deserved more time than they got.

ABET accredited i believe and yes our school does meet the standards.

Wow. I guess my school didn't deserve accreditation, then. Every engineering class I took (other than math) had a practical element to it. My intro EE class included a boxful of parts from which we were required to make a vehicle that followed a reflective line taped on a tabletop. My CS classes all (well, except one) included a practicum of some sort, from playing blackjack to building a 3D rendering system. I won't even go into the applications of operations research...My wife studied mech/aero eng at the same school and not only learned to weld but also how to build a glider from balsa and trim it for maximum time aloft.

Top that off with internships I did on Wall Street and in an Indonesian ceramics factory and I am forced to come to the conclusion that either I am incredibly ambitious (hah!) or my school is extraordinarily atypical...

Our school gets a lot of design/hands on projects but nothing like your describing. Most of my abilities to work with tools, weld, etc came from working on the 911 i used to have and the 944 turbo my dad still has, hence the reason i'm on this forum. However i'd say that 70% or more of our students can't weld, and 25% aren't that proficient with tools. But then again, that same professor i described above in the same class is also trying to pitch the idea of grad school very heavily.

Yeah, Lube, I'm not buying it. The (accredited) engineering schools that I attended had the ME students taking all kinds of communications and real-world classes.

Daddy was broadly an Aerospace Engineer, more specifically he was a Chemical, Mechanical and Materials Engineer. He matriculated from Wayne State with a BS in Chemistry in 1941. He spent an extra year at Cass Technical High School in Detroit. For you non Detroit fellows, Cass Tech was THE prepartory science and engineering HS in Detroit.

Daddy started work when he was 12 years old by selling Newspapers on the corner in Down town Detroit. While in HS during the heights of the Depression he got a job working for Packard eventually becoming a Tool and Die Maker. All this while he was going to school, he says that he put the books on the machine to study while he was working at night. During the War Daddy continued to work for Packard on the Rolls Royce Merlin aeroplane engines.

After the war Daddy left the factory floor to work for Parke Davis Pharmcueticals, Canada Dry Beverages as a Plant Manager, and as the guy who lined up the paint for the Paint By Number Company. In the mid 50's Mother ann Daddy set out for Californie thinking thats the place they ought to be. There Daddy worked for such companies as the Grand Central Rocket Co, Bermite Powder Company, Aerojet General, Douglas Aircraft and Hughs Aircraft. The most notable project that I remember his being on was the creation of an Atomic Bomb Simulator for the Army.

By the late 1960's Daddy was growing older and was tired of being kicked around from company to company as the defense contracts were completed. At that time he went into Civil Service working for the Navy with a GS 13 rating. There he developed and was awarded a patent for a Self Destruct Circuit Board. After that assignment he went up to Vandenburg AFB and monitered the launch of the Minute Man Missles from that facitlity. After that assignment he went to ROckwell and was the Materials engineer on the B1 Bomber, after that to TRW and agaiin was the Materials Engineer on the Spy Satalites finally he was out at GD as the Materials Engineer on the Stinger Missles.

The one thing Daddy always says is that the younger guys have all the theory but none of the practice of making things that work. Those years of Tool and Die making held him in good stead.

Blue Sky, I would have loved to attend your school. Throughout our entire 135 hours of AE curriculum, there was not one opportunity to get your hands dirty or put your education to work. My mechanical knowledge and inclination is a result of my own interests, not my education.

I think most modern engineering schools require you to take a variety of general ed classes. My early classes included two speech classes, two writing classes, natural and human sciences, etc. This is core curriculum at most schools. Where they fall short is actually applying the theory that they teach. I'd be willing to bet that 1/2 of my fellow students would be hard pressed to change the oil on their car, yet they are headed out into the world to design complex mechanical systems. Scary.....

Wouldn't hurt to know some Spainish either...

Are you salivating now? :p

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ;)