Engineering is alive and kicking in the USA
I send a lot of time visiting Universities trying to get them to use PSoC in the classes. I meet a lot of students who are very interested in Engineer but frankly don;t know if it makes sense for a carreer. I used to think that the day would come when kids would no longer want to consider such a path. After going throught the Minneapolis airport I no longer worry.
After using the restroom I was washing my hands I saw a young man, about 10 years old, "experimenting with the hand dryer. It was one of those Dyson air knives. The kid was moving his hands in from different angles trying to figure out how it worked. You could tell what he really wanted was enough tools to take it apart. It is then that I realized that Engineer is more than profession. It is a particular way of looking at the world.
As I left I saw a women who anxiously waiting be the bathroom. I asked if see was waiting for a young man. She said she was and she was worried that he had been in there for a long time. A told her he was studying the hand dryer. She rolled he eyes. I told her that her son suffered from the curse of the handy and would end up being an engineer. She told me her husband was an engineer and she hoped it skipped a generation.
So as long as there are kids that want to take things apart, the enginereing schools will have students.
Thursday, March 26 at 04:21 (GMT -8:00)
My very first chemistry trainer told us that the most significant quality of a researcher is the ability to become amazed:
Don't try to explain something, just get consumed by the existence of an object or phenemona.
Next step is to expose every of your senses to it and listening to the "echos".
After all that you may (slightly) try to change something and/or reproduce the effect.
Research is driven by being amazed of (simple) things.
When I look at my kids I consider them to be born as researcher.
In contrast I am a developer.
I use effects other people already researched.
But I try to bring up my children as engineers (I must be mad!).
My plan is simple, the realization is not:
I just have to encourage the developer, without killing the researcher.
The real world is not leaving much room for the "developing" kind .. lack of time, lack of recources, lack of money.
It's no useless luxery to lean back and look over the situation as a whole before diving into it.
To free your mind and think different is usually the best way to solve things without the usual (!) issues (Funny that it was a dyson-product in your example).
Marketing is attached to safe but worn out roads, so that it's hard to place a really (!) new product.
Kolumbus gained tons of profit for the spanish crown with the idea of doing it literally "the other way round".
So I always try to give my kids the time (and encourage them) to find out that pa's harddrive is not as hard as the name suggests ... even if that is hard for me.
Markus
Thursday, June 18 at 12:37 (GMT -8:00)
I agree, for many of us it's more a calling or a character trait than it is a reasoned decision.
The engineering schools, however, need to get out of the 1950s mentality of engineering being this ultra rigid discipline and a singular focus on problem-solution teaching, rather than treating the subject as more of an creative artform with, well, REALLY complicated tools. And what is with deliberately structuring programs to fail a known percentage of students, or requiring 4 year graduations for curriculums that are more suited to 5?
So, yes, there will always be engineers, but whether the schools continue to have students may depend on how they treat them.
FWIW, I went to North Carolina State University, and aced the program, but still think it was run very badly. The subject is intrinsically difficult. Don't artificially add more to it.