#5 - Engineering Education System

“One is not likely to achieve understanding from the explanation of another.” - Takuan Soho

I brought up engineering education in my last post, so I might as well share some thoughts on that now. In my personal experience, I learned way more from hands-on projects than I did from book learning. Basically, I learned despite going to college rather than because of it. For most of my four years, I took part in Formula SAE building a racecar rather than going to class.

So how did we get to a place where you have to skip class to learn? If you look back at the history of engineering education, apprenticeships were the traditional way to learn. You studied under an experienced engineer as you worked on real projects in real life. Even when universities started to become more popular, courses were heavily trade focused until WWII. According to this random slideshow I found online, which I’ve taken as fact, atomic weaponry and radar led to an impression of science being more useful than engineering. Federal funding meant that universities were incentivized to bring more science-y types to universities. Practical instruction largely disappeared.

So the science-ification of engineering is a fairly recent trend in the grand scheme of things. You could argue that technology has developed incredibly in that time and that the new schooling is working. But I don’t know. Most of the space-related technology was, in my view, a direct result of the billions of dollars poured into it. Outside of the space industry, it doesn’t feel like mechanical engineering has progressed all that much quicker than it was before.

All I can talk about with certainty are my observations. When I’ve been in interviews, young graduates get tripped up on basic conceptual questions. Their heads are seemingly overflowing with formulas and problem sets that are of no use in practical day to day work. This ties back to what I think is the key skill in engineering: picking the correct model to represent reality. Not solving that model. If you solve problems out of a textbook, they are - by definition - going to leave out this most important skill.

I don’t suggest doing away completely with the instruction of science and theory but I think it should follow from the practical. Theories would only be taught when the student has grappled with reality and seen the need for simplification. This functions nicely as a BS-deterrent too. Theories wouldn’t be taught just because somebody came up with them.