<p>I feel that students should take an initiative to, on their own time, research the implications of various things that they learn. In my case, to understand thermodynamics and Gas laws, I did some research on HVAC systems and refrigerators. It make the concepts more vivid and understandable.</p>
<p>If students want to better understand the relevance and practicality of knowledge, they should do their own study and research outside of what is taught. As the engineers here know, an engineer constantly is learning new things to keep up with new research findings, ideas, technologies, etc. Students should be encouraged to do extra work in this regard.</p>
<p>That intense, theoretically based engineering education is what turned me away from engineering and into medicine. I pursued engineering because I wanted to build electronic gadgets in college and not to deconstruct mathematical theories. There needs to be a heavy applied side to engineering pedagogy or you deliver drones graduates who will be at the mercy of business graduates. There is nothing wrong with developing some creativity during the learning process to deliver competent versatile engineers. Even if it means watering down the science. There will always be the theoretical engineers around.</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is that its the responsibility of any good school to prepare its graduates for the highest level of career potential possible. That means that a good undergrad engineering program should prepare every student for graduate school, even if not every student intends on going to graduate school.</p>
<p>It’s better to overprepare a student than to leave that student underprepared should they change their minds later on about grad school.</p>
<p>Learning the theory is a necessity in my book. There’s no way around it. If you prefer a more applied engineering approach then perhaps a degree in engineering technology may be more suitable.</p>
<p>I think you can have both and more schools are moving in that direction every day. Olin, WPI and Cal Poly come to mind. I can’t vouch for the first two although I hear they have good reputations.</p>
<p>Poly is well respected for producing top notch engineers. The way they are able to get both theory and practical is that they admit to the specific major (not just engineering, but branch), dive right in from Freshman year and have limited space for non-degree related classes. In your 200 hours of credits, give or take a couple, there’s plenty of time to get both approaches.</p>
<p>Then you should have been studying engineering technology, not engineering proper. That is typically a technician job. This is precisely what you are describing.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not if you “water down the science” there won’t be. Engineering is an application of math and physics toward solving real-world problems (often leading to products). You aren’t going to be very good at doing this if you don’t have a strong grasp of those two topics, and that includes theory. Sure, not all engineers go and use that material day-to-day in their jobs, but it’s an important building block for more advanced coursework. Meanwhile, there are a fair number of engineering positions that do get very theoretical, and it is best to prepare your students for any job they may be interested in taking, not just the less theoretical ones.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>And I just saw that fractalmstr said pretty much what I have already.</p>
<p>My son returned home with a funny story! a woman engineering student told him she was switching out of engineering after a semester because " engineering is fun but I hate all that math and physics stuff".:)</p>
<p>I think the the issue of students having too much theoretical knowledge rather than applied skills is solved by engineering labs and senior design projects as someone here may of already mentioned.</p>
<p>When a universities boasts hands on learning, I’ve found that they usually aren’t skimping on the hard science and math courses but simply offer more more labs and projects classes.</p>
<p>I agree there should be some balance, but I’d definitely say that the engineering classes I took, as a whole, were too applied heavy. I assumed pretty much all schools were the same but I could see how a school could be too theoretical and abstract for people to really understand anything about what they were doing, which isn’t useful either.</p>
<p>I graduated over 30 years ago with a CS degree, and I have never had to do a mathematical proof for work. Nor have I seen anyone else that needed to do one.</p>
<p>My grad IE degree had plenty of math, but thank God none of the teaching involved proofs.</p>
<p>The world would be a better place if the all the useless, mind-numbingly dull hours of proofs were replaced by instruction on the practical uses of math.</p>
<p>I had two engineering jobs. One was an internship where I had to learn Unix and provide support for my company’s sales department. My duties had absolutely nothing to do with what I learned in school. My last job was definitely an applied electrical engineering job. I had so much to learn during the first 2 years. Although I could see where the theory fit into the job, it wasn’t required at all. The engineering techs ran circles around me and the other engineers. I never had to work a math problem beyond trigonometry but yet our business was a multi billion dollar company.</p>
<p>I advocate an approach like Olin, Cal Poly, and WPI. Provide students hands-on experience very early on so the theory makes sense. Furthermore, the student can develop some creativity during the learning process to become better engineers. Looking back, if I had the application along with the theory, OMG, I would be an engineer today and would have accomplished so much at my last job. But I am glad I turned to medicine.</p>
<p>Lastly, I have to say that we don’t train our nurses and doctors with theory and send them out into the “real” world. These professionals get hands on experience early on so they can tie the basic sciences to their clinical duties. I know, I know, engineering isn’t medicine. But after going through both, I have to say that engineering education can learn a lot from the way we teach our medical professionals.</p>
<p>That’s because nurses and doctors are an entirely different sort of profession than engineering and their training shouldn’t be comparable. The only comparable type of engineers I can think of are those that are double troubleshooting/equipment maintenance type jobs.</p>
<p>You are in medicine, so who do you think it is that designs the latest, smallest MRI machines? It’s not the guys who went to school to build electronic gadgets; it’s the ones who went there and learned the maxwell equations. It’s the guys who learned their quantum mechanics who are designing the latest and greatest computers. It’s the guys who understand the fundamental physics behind fluid flows that ultimately keep the latest and greatest planes in the air. These are just a small number of tasks accomplished by those who need to have a stronger grounding in theory. Even if that is only 10% of engineers (and I’d argue it’s more), that still warrant teaching it.</p>
<p>That’s not to say that those wanting to put electronic gadgets together aren’t also valuable. They are. You just can’t and shouldn’t dumb down the curriculum to cater to the less technical jobs. You teach the hard stuff, the theory, and make sure they are familiar with some applications and also good learners so they can go learn specific applications on the job. Meanwhile those that want the more technically rigorous jobs are plenty prepared for them instead of being dragged through watered down courses that are insufficient to fill those jobs.</p>
<p>And if you really just don’t want theory and want to build electronic gadgets rather than design the high tech components themselves, they have a degree for that already. It’s called engineering technology.</p>
<p>I’m doing/did both CS and IE for undergrad. My experience has been that CS here is slightly too applied but not terribly so. I’ve done proofs in a number of classes and while they’re hard I think they help expand your mind and thinking abilities, even if they’re not directly applicable to productive industry. Particularly the classes I took in “Theory” and “Intelligent Systems” categories were appropriate, but elsewhere I think they would have been better for being more theoretical rather than applied. For IE though, I think is suffers greatly because of how applied it is. Notably in upper level (undergrad) elective classes, it’s not problem solving methods they teach, it’s memorizing and performing algorithms for solving particular problems. This is completely useless in my opinion. We have the internet! If we need to look up an algorithm we can google it.</p>
<p>mikey750, how do you determine just how much a university such as Cal Poly provides practical experience? Do you speak from first hand experience?</p>
<p>“I think you can have both and more schools are moving in that direction every day. Olin, WPI and Cal Poly come to mind. I can’t vouch for the first two although I hear they have good reputations.” </p>
<p>I can talk to Olin. DS attends, and it is much more project-oriented than my STEM school 30 years ago. It is also very competitive for admission (all students get half tuition scholarship) and has intense academics. Olin has a mission to teach their few students but also in general to lead the way on engineering education reform</p>
<p>Frugal Doc, boneh3ad, Colo_Mom and others: Harvey Mudd started a hands-on experience for its engineering students called Engineering Clinic, because the founders wanted an analogy to the hands on experience that medical students receive in clinic. This program was started 50 yrs ago and its success prompted other schools to adopt similar programs.
Mudd also started its freshman design project around the same time because they found that it helped student retention as they proceded through the theory-intensive core curriculum. So Mudd is a pioneer and a firm believer in providing hands-on learning experiences to complement theoretical knowledge.</p>
<p>The “perfect” engineer is one who can combine a good theoretical knowledge with the hands on practicality that comes from actually dealing with hardware. I’ve seen some engineers who were too much to one end or the other of that spectrum and they were not very good engineers.</p>
<p>College provides the opportunity and the resources to learn the theoretical; something that is not always available on the job. You also need to know the theoretical before you can understand the practical. I believe that college should be both theoretical and practical but lean a little more on the theoretical side as one can pick up a lot of the practical on the job.</p>
<p>Short story: I was working on testing a very lightweight built up beam section using several materials. We were doing a 4 point bending test on it and the deflections were much higher than predicted by our calculations. Our calculations based on simple beam bending equations. Finally we just drew a straight vertical line on the beam with a marker. The line was a little off and not perfectly straight under load. It was then obvious what the problem was. Basic beam equations assume the plane sections remain plane and this wasn’t behaving that way. The web was too soft. Understanding the theory helped us quickly assess the problem and design a solution to fix it.</p>
<p>Miles - Yes, Mudd heavily influenced Olin and other project programs. It’s a great school… amazing combo of intense academics and project work.</p>
<p>Mudd and Olin were DS’s top two choices, even over MIT. (He was not accepted at MIT, but not dismayed). When Mudd was his top choice, we got used to people saying, “Harvey What?” since not well known in CO. Most have not heard of Olin either.</p>