Pelican Parts Forums - did anyone go to MIT?

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Quote:

Originally Posted by nostatic (Post 4603049)

True Matt, but what happens 10 years down the road when one decides that accounting sucks?

After 10 years as an engineer If you decide you don't want to sit in a lab and play with stuff there are plenty of options.

It is much easier for someone with a technical background to pick up say marketing, sales or management skills than it is for a salesman, marketeer or manager to become technically oriented. Would a BA in political science have started Pelican Parts?

Quote:

Originally Posted by rick-l (Post 4603373)

It is much easier for someone with a technical background to pick up say marketing, sales or management skills than it is for a salesman, marketeer or manager to become technically oriented. Would a BA in political science have started Pelican Parts?

Lets not get carried away. Don't confuse education with intelligence. My guess is that Wayne probably had the capacity to start this business pre-MIT. There's a number of folks that have done amazing things without any formal education.

Otherwise I agree to an extent, but it depends on the person. I work with a number of engineers that don't have the ability to balance a checkbook or sell a bottle of water in the desert, but have amazing technical design ability. I happen to be more balanced, and picked up a business management minor along with my aerospace engineering degree. Personally I found my business classes to be the easiest and most interesting classes that I took in college. Probably why management is my career path of choice.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wayne at Pelican Parts (Post 4603224)

Without going into details, I compared the two schools side-by-side when deciding where to go as a graduate student. It's been 15 years since I looked this info up, but I believe at the time MIT had about $245 in annual research funding from government and private business. 2nd place behind them was Stanford, with something like $20 million or so. Caltech was somewhere behind Stanford. The opportunities clearly follow the money trail when it comes to research. As mentioned previously, my grad school tuition was paid for with private research grants (from AMP corporation).

-Wayne

Consider the sizes of the institutions and the student per capita tells a slightly different story. However I'm not an engineer, so I can't comment on those programs. Well beyond the fact that JPL is at Caltech :p

I was paid to go to grad school as well - that's the way it works in science. In my case GTAs came out of department money, my GRA was a combination of ONR and NIH money.

Both are great schools. They have different vibes and sizes, but there is nothing that I lacked for at CalTech. Nor did any of my colleagues. When I finally chose my grad school, my advisor, who to that point had been rather silent other than insisting that I not waste my brain in med school (sorry Moses ;) ) finally gave her opinion. She got her PhD at Harvard under Frank Westheimer in the late 50's. A pretty impressive achievement for a Japanese-American woman. She stared at me from over her horn-rimmed glasses and said, "there are two special places in the world for chemistry - Harvard and Caltech."

That isn't to say that there aren't amazing people doing amazing work at other schools. And part of that also is history and living on laurels (*cough* Harvard *cough*). And at this point, do I use any chemistry in my work? Nope. I do solve problems though...sadly many of them are people problems.