Because activities that apply theory, hands on if you will, has been highly correlated to retention and success. There’s a reason why nearly every engineering program is moving in this direction.
My son fabricated parts for a race car and for a satellite launcher. Those were club activities. By the time he got to senior project he and two other team members were able to build a device that the visitors on industry day couldn’t believe they’d pulled off alone, let alone in a single year.
It was important to D. Maker spaces, shops, 3D printing labs, etc… needed to have cool toys and be accessible to freshmen. The hands on experience was her number one criteria and that was part of it.
Not all colleges have made training in these workshops a requirement for undergrads. However, nearly all graduate programs in engineering and experimental sciences make such training a prerequisite a graduate student does before s/he starts to work in the lab.
The important caveat is that the vast majority of engineers do not go to graduate school. So, many can miss out on this critical component.
To be clear, no school is teaching students these techniques to use them themselves at a high level. A few do, mainly for fun, bike frame building club for example, but most get a single lab exposure in a lab and a week of lectures on the physical chemistry/materials science if each technique. The purpose is mainly to do the latter, but those who do the former, understand the tools they’ll be calling out in manufacturing. They are better engineers for this exposure because they don’t design things that can’t be built.
The understanding of what an engineer will actually do day in and day out is not usually realized until late in the curriculum. Giving students access to what would usually be tech work, keeps them engaged. Plus, it makes them more creative.
@Search2022, at my son’s school, the creative/hobby activities were in the student center and open to any student of any major after they were trained. The could build skateboard decks, sew, turn baseball bats, etc. there are even multiple surfboard shaping bays.
That’s a separate entity to the spaces in engineering departments where the students use plasma cutters, laser cutters, metal lathes, welders of various types and CNC machines. My sons school even has a stainless steel 3D printer on load from Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The trained engineers get access to BOTH types of spaces for personal and club projects.
I linked what I think is the most unique club. They are fully undergraduate driven, no pun intended.
Maker spaces are important to my son. He has always been doing projects outside school - building forges to melt aluminum, 3D printing air engines, etc. - and that is his entertainment. I think he places too much emphasis on maker spaces, but there are worse ways to spend free time than working on a mad scientist project.
This is one area where CMU is not as strong as CWRU. Not only is CMU’s TechSpark space much smaller than the ThinkBox, but students need to take lock-step mini classes before using equipment, and more senior students - read sophomores and juniors - get priority over freshman.
Plus, with the amount of time required by CMU students just for classes, maker time may be limited. A few that I knew at CMU transitioned from maker time to various club time - if they had any!
Speaking with several CMU engineering students during our visit on Thursday and Friday, the consensus seems to be that they work hard, but their heads are not exploding. Everyone we talked to seemed to have time for sports, clubs, and other activities. And they seemed to be getting sleep.
In addition to Spark, which is the “engineering” maker space, there is also the Ideate maker space which is in the basement of the Hunt Library : IDeATe Spaces - IDeATe - Carnegie Mellon University
It’s open to all students, and has a more arts and creativity bent from what I could see, but includes a wood shop a fabrication facilities, as well a studios and the like.
My sense was that the training required is simple and available, but you’d want to check that with current students. I think there are short micro courses that get you up to speed. Here’s what the website says:
The facility is open throughout the day to allow for making and learning to happen any time the inspiration strikes. The classrooms are accessible to all students. The maker labs are accessible to all students who complete introductory courses that provide the necessary training for using the equipment.
I love these kinds of posts that claim that everything is “equal.” Nothing could be farther from the truth and Georgetown’s empirical information proves it pretty clearly. After 40 years of employment, ROI for MIT and Caltech are ranked number 4 at @ 2.5 million $, Cornell is ranked 41 at @ 1.9 million $, Caltech is ranked, Stanford is ranked 11 @ 2.2 million$ and CMU is ranked 13 @ 2.1 million $ earnings. I know that for some the purpose of this site is a “feel good” exercise for teens, but the reality of the world is that where you go to college and what you do really does matter.
Sorry for the Caltech editorial error. Here’s a link to the Georgetown site for those interested in the monetary value of a college degree: Ranking 4,500 Colleges by ROI (2022) - CEW Georgetown.
I never said every school was equal. The problem with the analysis you linked is that it doesn’t sort by major. Every school is not equal by major major either, but within engineering and CS many are VERY close. This ranking, for all intents and purposes, is worthless, as is every other ROI/NPV ranking for entire schools.
DCK, There are several other shops on campus, including those run by specific academic departments and clubs. None are as well equipped as Spark. For example, the Robotics Club has a shop with three 3D printers, and equipment that appears to have come from a 1960s high school including lathes, band-saws, planers, and drill presses. No formal training is required, but the equipment is pretty low-tech, low-drag.
We toured Spark with the guy who runs it and saw the complete list of required classes. Each class runs a half semester and must be taken before a student can use the covered equipment, and there are limited spaces in each class. More senior students get priority so a new student may not get to use equipment in Spark until their sophomore or junior year.
Curious, Thanks for the link to Georgetown’s ROI rating site. I tried to drill down to see ROI by school/by major, but did not find it. Was it not provided, or did I just miss it?
I think doing ROI by school without differentiating based on major, or even just the college, does not tell you very much. The ROI for a CompSci major at UIUC will be very different from an education or philosophy major from the same school.
And THAT’S the point.
Most schools with high ROIs have a large proportion of technical majors. Posters like @CuriousInterloper use those ROIs to justify paying a bunch more for a technical degree, that when compared major to major and not institution to institution result in very similar earnings.
According to College Scorecard the average salaries at 2 years for Mechanical Engineer grads from MIT and University of Michigan Dearborn are $88K and $85K respectively. The ROIs of the institutions though are radically different at $2.5M for MIT and $1.2M for U Mich Dearborn.
NOTE: even though CC automatically links to the main UM campus in Ann Arbor, this is the campus in DEARBORN, a campus on the radar of VERY few CC families.
Question about the ROI information. Is that broken down by major? Obviously STEM related schools such as MIT or Caltech are going to have a higher ROI because all of their majors are higher paid. Whereas, at a school with education majors or agricultural majors for example ROI may be dragged down by lower paid majors.
One of my kids goes to a school that touts it’s ROI very heavily. It has 30 or so majors - Architecture/CS/engineering/business. All highly paid. My engineering son has had two internships so far and has worked alongside interns from all across the country, from large rural state schools to small top 20’s. They all ended up with the same job and paid the same.
Didn’t see your response when I tyoed mine. You are exactly right.
Comparing notes with engineering grads from other programs (I was Purdue), all entail a great deal of work. Some kids handle it fairly easily, others, with perhaps a less rigorous background or poor study habits, find it more difficult. But engineering is engineering and curriculum from school to school is fairly similar. [Having said that, at Purdue, they seemed to take pride in fact that about 1/3 of class didn’t make it and changed majors – some of the classes seemed designed to weed out folks. Do less exclusive programs drive for that to prove their rigor? This was decades ago, so may be different now.]
Bioart, When I was at CMU in the 1980s it seemed the school was trying to weed out the bottom 20% of engineering, design and architecture students during freshman and sophomore years. For the engineers they achieved this through difficulty of tests. For the students in juried majors they weeded out the weak through sheer workload. I know quite a few people who started as EEs, then switched to CivEs, and finally graduated as Econ majors. I don’t think CMU had a monopoly on this culture and have heard similar stories about other engineering schools.
Based on discussions with current students, it appears that the school still works the kids hard, but is not trying to drop the bottom 20%.