Kelly at HackCollege and Richard Millington (a fellow Brazen Careerist) recently wrote their views on what college is and what it should be. Richard says that university should be an incubator for entrepreneurship, a place for students to get practical experience, not theory - simulate the stuff that we are going to do after we get out. Kelly goes the route that school should be more than just the curricular component, it should be about independently experimenting and developing practical experience.
As an engineering student, I think that both of these guys have good ideas, and I’d like to offer my take on them. Curiously, both are in more liberal artsy fields (Richard - marketing, Kelly - film (w/a focus in CS to be fair)) - how do these ideas apply to engineering? A definition to get us started:
engineering
the art or science of making practical application of the knowledge of pure sciences
Sounds like engineering, by its nature, should be pretty practical, right? Well, I don’t know about that… But that does bring up a good distinction to make - engineering practice versus engineering education.
I think that traditional engineering curriculum puts a great deal of emphasis on the theory and science, without showing you what you can actually do with all of this knowledge. It seems all too often, you spend a little bit of time at the beginning of your engineering school career doing neat little demos showing you what engineering can be (the cool class that they show off to you when you are touring the university as a high school senior). After that, they throw you into a couple years of studying stuff without a real idea of what goes on outside of school or how the stuff you learn applies to anything, then you finish your studies by doing some “capstone” project.
A lot of the time, the work that I have done in school does not seem to really connect to anything I might do after school. The coops/internships that I have done so far barely depend on anything I might have learned in school. I have found that most of what I have needed to know in those jobs was stuff that I already knew from personal experience (that may be a side effect of my chosen field being connected to my hobbies).
There is a movement in some engineering schools towards a more practical curriculum (while not being a trade school), showing real world applications of your knowledge, a more active way of studying. I think that that would be great, but I think Kelly is on to something even better with his “mental playground” idea - it would be cool to be able to expand education to something bigger than just curriculum. He talked about all of the experience he has gotten from running and developing HackCollege; that should count for something for his education, right? (Note to self: Find someone to give me course credit for blogging here) After all, “education” broadly speaking, is more than just class, it’s extracurriculars, doing stupid stuff with your friends (and learning from it), connecting with people in your field, etc.
Read the comments on those posts for some good stuff.
Comments 6
Clarification: I’m getting two degrees :). CS is as close to engineering as it gets without actually being engineering. I respect you guys, don’t worry.
I think even engineers should not railroad themselves. Rather than pick the obvious projects, it’s good to try something different. For example, for one of my final projects I’m trying to code a Wordpress file system. It wasn’t proposed by my professor and it might never get done. Without inflating my ego too much, I think it’s an interesting project that plugs directly into my operating systems class.
Posted 17 Apr 2008 at 2:26 am ¶@KellySutton Oh, my bad, must have misread the post. And yes, CS guys are almost as crazy as we are.
I was thinking more about this after I posted this and I think you’re right about not just picking obvious projects. It could be like Google’s 20% time -> work on a side project 1 day a week, and maybe it will turn into something cool, maybe it won’t.
Posted 17 Apr 2008 at 7:56 am ¶I don’t know about other places, but the University of Toronto won’t give you your degree unless you’ve logged a certain number of “practical experience” hours. By itself, it doesn’t help much: I got my hours from web design, even though I was studying mechanical engineering, simply for lack of options. There’s no such thing as a mechanical engineering summer job, and the only kind of co-op my school offers basically involves taking a year off from work and graduating a year later.
I think it helps to remember that, despite the halo around its head, college education is a consumer product. There is only so much it can give you, and it is no substitute for taking charge of your own life. Of course, don’t expect colleges to tell students that — they’re not in the business of sabotaging their own product.
Posted 17 Apr 2008 at 8:31 am ¶That is a good point Sergiy, I am familiar with some schools that require some coop or internship experience (RIT comes to mind). I’ve done 3-month summer jobs twice and one summer-fall coop during college and I’ve never done them for credit.
I’ve thought that the particular college you go to (prestigious or not) doesn’t really matter, college is going to be what you make of it, no matter where it is.
Posted 17 Apr 2008 at 9:03 am ¶I am a mechanical engineering and nuclear engineering student and I completely agree that engineering students need practical experience. Although, not at the cost of the curriculum. It seems hard for the professors to teach all of the material they have to by the end of the semester as it is and engineering generally has more credits for graduation than other majors, so taking time for more "real world" experiences would just make it harder to graduate in the standard 4 years. Why not just use the time you would add for the "real world" experience and find a good coop/internship to get actual real world experience at a company? There is no way a university can effectively show you everything that you can do with what you have learned, more than likely a professor would just end up showing you what he/she is interested in. Coops let you choose an experience that specializes in what YOU are interested in.
I was very picky about where I went for my coop (asking older student for their experiences, researching the companies, visiting the facilities), so I avoided the common coop experience of being some engineer’s cheap slave and getting no hands on experience myself. Instead I worked for 2 major companies (the second bought the first during my coop), had my own projects from concept to supervision of field use, have 2 patents in my name, I have been asked to stay on part time until I graduate, and I had a lot of fun doing it. I am not trying to brag, just point out that there are very good coop opportunities out there that can jump start your career and remind you why you are in engineering in the first place.
As for the independent experimenting, that is where a “self-designed” or “self-guided” degree comes in. Just pick what you want to do and how you think it makes sense and voila you have your very own degree, just for you. You can change it around as you see fit, just so you can justify how it maintains a certain direction and avoids becoming a huge jumble of electives.
Finally, the curriculum was originally designed with post graduate experience in mind via the EIT program. I know you are trying to say how the education system needs to be updated, but I thought this is at least worth a mention since I am planning on doing it. The EIT (Engineer In Training) program was made as the road to achieving the Professional Engineer title. After the Fundamentals of Engineering Exam (FE) you become an EIT. Four years of experience (usually supervised by a Professional Engineer) are needed before you are allowed to take the Professional Engineer exam. This is set up sort of like a trade with apprenticeship but was intended to be like grad school that was completely real world experience, since that is what most engineers need more than normal grad school with more theory.
Posted 17 Apr 2008 at 10:40 am ¶@Adam I agree with you that school shouldn’t be highly focused on “real-world experience” (it would be a vocational school then). The biggest thing for me that would make this education more practical is if there was more emphasis on how what we are learning in class appears in the real world. For example, when we talk about Solid State Electronics, explain this stuff in the context of how it matters for a semiconductor fab or when learning about Linear Systems, where does this stuff come up? Wireless communications, power electronics?
That is interesting about the Professional Engineering program, I’ve thought about doing the FE exam when it comes around, but I’m not sure how much value there is in that for a Computer Engineer (as opposed to a Civil or Nuclear Engineer, where certifications of that sort would be more valuable, from my understanding).
Posted 17 Apr 2008 at 12:09 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
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