Building a 21st-Century Renaissance Engineer

[M.D. Holloway]

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

Building a 21st-Century Renaissance Engineer

ControlGlobal.com By Keith Larson

It seems to me lately that whenever U.S. industry isn’t bemoaning the dearth of young people interested in engineering careers, we’re dissing the ones who do enter the workforce as woefully unprepared. It’s a common lament: Graduates of the country’s 300 or so undergraduate engineering programs often emerge well-grounded in theory—almost to the exclusion of other competencies—but lack the practical experience, the communication skills and the business sense needed to hit the ground running upon entering the real world.

Want business context? Get an MBA. Want to be able to speak and write? That’s for the liberal arts grads on the other side of campus. No room for that stuff in a hard-core engineering curriculum.

Or is there?

Well, the folks at the country’s first independent engineering college of the new millennium are on their way to find out. Last year’s first graduating class of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass., started classes in the fall of 2002 and embarked on an innovative four-year curriculum designed to “infuse a rigorous engineering education with business and entrepreneurship as well as the arts, humanities and social sciences,” according to the school’s web site.

The college was founded through a more than $400 million grant from the Olin Foundation with the ambitious goal of changing the way students learn about engineering. Indeed, the stated mission of the school is to “prepare future leaders through an innovative engineering education that bridges science and technology, enterprise and society. Skilled in independent learning and the art of design, our graduates will seek opportunities and take initiative to make a positive difference in the world.”

Admission is highly competitive; degrees are granted in electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering and “engineering” (which allows for considerable self-directed pursuit); and each of the 304 students is on a four-year, full-tuition scholarship.

“It was clear that engineers needed to have business and entrepreneurship skills, creativity and an understanding of the social, political and economic contexts of engineering,” says Richard K. Miller, college president.

“The F.W. Olin Foundation decided the best way to maximize its impact was to help create a college from scratch that can address these emerging needs,” Miller added. “And by creating a college from scratch, we can approach education in a whole new way—a way that will best serve the engineers of the new millennium.”
The curriculum is based on the “Olin Triangle,” a combination of rigorous science and engineering fundamentals, entrepreneurship and the liberal arts. The school also espouses a deep commitment at all levels to active learning and interdisciplinary courses built around hands-on projects. This real-world approach culminates in SCOPE (Senior Consulting Program for Engineering), a significant, year-long engineering project for an actual client.

And for those of us in the automation community, it is especially gratifying to see instrumentation and controls represented not only in the course work, but also among the companies sponsoring SCOPE projects. Rockwell Automation, for example, has charged a team of students with identifying, assessing and developing a viable industrial application for a microfluidic sensor chip. aPriori, an enterprise cost management software company, has students developing real-time cost models of manufacturing processes. And a team sponsored by Pratt & Whitney is developing multi-variable probes for wirelessly characterizing flows through the company’s gas turbine engine subsystems.

[onewhippedpuppy]

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.

[Aerkuld]

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.

[MotoSook]

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!

[1fastredsc]

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.

[Jim Sims]

"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

[tabs]

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

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Graduates of the country’s 300 or so undergraduate engineering programs often emerge well-grounded in theory—almost to the exclusion of other competencies—but lack the practical experience, the communication skills and the business sense needed to hit the ground running upon entering the real world.

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

[tabs]

Originally Posted by BlueSkyJaunte

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

But can they make the trains run on time.

[onewhippedpuppy]

Originally Posted by BlueSkyJaunte

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

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.

[tabs]

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

[1fastredsc]

Originally Posted by Jim Sims

"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 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.

[1fastredsc]

Originally Posted by onewhippedpuppy

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.

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

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Originally Posted by onewhippedpuppy

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.

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...

[1fastredsc]

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.

[island911]

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.

[tabs]

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.

[onewhippedpuppy]

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.....

[M.D. Holloway]

Originally Posted by Wayne at Pelican Parts

Everyone with an engineering degree should be required to:

- Take a basic business course
- Learn Excel & also learn to program in Perl
- Have at least 100 hrs in a machine shop
- Drive a backhoe
- Visit a factory floor and work with assembly line workers
- Take a basic "design" course that teaches customer focus
- Know at least one 3D CAD program and produce at least one STL part

-Wayne

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

[legion]

Originally Posted by tabs

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

Are you salivating now?