<p>It’s a really interesting article and I’m mulling it over in my head. </p>
<p>I went to MIT and found it really hard freshman and sophomore year. I did some undergraduate research projects sophomore year, but I really didn’t “get it”. </p>
<p>After sophomore year I got a summer coop at a real company and had an epiphany. After that I sucked it all in, theory, practice, and couldn’t get enough. </p>
<p>I can’t put my finger on what it was, but when I worked in the company, I saw other people who didn’t seem any smarter than me being engineers, and being successful, and I guess I just got some confidence. People seemed to have an operational fluency with concepts that I struggled with in school. The job was much easier than school, and concepts I had trouble with in school, were clear as day when I needed to use them on the job. </p>
<p>I can’t say why it was that I struggled initially, but I don’t think I really understood what engineering was, and what the point of all these classes were until I saw that they were actually good for something. </p>
<p>Later on in graduate school, a famous professor gave a seminar for TAs on teaching. He taught us that basically, engineering is the art of taking complex problems and breaking them down into smaller and smaller pieces until you get to something you should have seen on a problem set. The problem sets, the theory if you will, are really critical to the engineering education, and I question whether the graduates of WPI get enough of it to be able to do that well. </p>
<p>On the other hand, nobody told me that until graduate school. Maybe if somebody would have told me that as a freshman, I would have known what I was looking for when trying to learn all of this stuff that I just had to take on faith was good for something. But perhaps people told me that, and I didn’t know how to understand what they were saying. I heard the words, but they didn’t mean much. </p>
<p>I think it’s a chicken and egg problem. If you do projects that don’t require you to use “theory”, then you don’t see the value in it anyway. If you try to get younger engineers to do harder problems that require that the theory be used, they can’t do it because they don’t know the theory yet. </p>
<p>So, I don’t know the answer, but I understand the issues. </p>
<p>My kids have taken AP Physics B using the Giancoli book. I really like the course and the book because they work on mathematical problem solving, but also try to take the magic out of many things kids would have experience with. I think it’s a great course for future engineers. I think it teaches a lot, but also leaves them understanding that their math is inadequate for many problems and motivates the learning of higher math. I know I didn’t appreciate just how much of engineering was mathematical tools. </p>
<p>I don’t really have an answer. Some people would be better off in the long run with the WPI approach, and some people would be better off in the long run with the more brutal approach of the top schools. Those successful at the top schools will probably have learned more, but those who got weeded out probably would have been better off with “kinder and gentler” WPI. </p>
<p>When there is a mismatch, we have lost a potential engineer by either over or under challenging them. There are opportunities for engineers at a wide range of degrees of difficulty of what they work on. I work on very difficult stuff, but there are a lot of people that work on things that just aren’t that hard, but still need people to do it. We need to produce more of both. </p>
<p>I don’t know if that answers your question.</p>