Does the school really matter?

GLOBALTRAVELER · January 31, 2011, 11:29pm

Sakky,

You are asking me this same question on “how”, and I am still thinking on how to explain it. Now yes we may be off-topic for this thread but then again, this is “Does The School Matter”…revision #1,278 so I don’t really feel to bad in hijacking it.

Hmmm…y’know. The only thing I can think of is having a mindset like another popular major on a college campus…Business.

Let’s take the music industry. You can have the artists that makes more “traditional or creative” rock or even hip-hop, but they are outsold by the artists who make the more “pop” version ot the music genre. The more pop artist cares less about the roots, foundations and core of the music genre and care more about generating revenue so they can live their non-working times of their life better. The “work” becomes just a means to support the non-working time. To the pop artists, concentrating on just the core will not pay the bills…or pay the bills enough. Probably a better phrase would be return-on-investment.

Maybe that could fitted into engineering and science workers. Something like consulting, is just catering to the wider pool of clients. Concentrating on the core (research or the pure engineering/science of it) just will not produce enough return-on-investment. That makes the engineer/scientist now more business-minded and less science-minded. The engineering/science/technical job is now just a way to get as much return-on-investment as possible…and any outlet that may open must be taken advantage of regardless HOW less hard or how less technical it is viewed. In music the non-pop artists will question the more pop-like artists “realness” or difficulty. It will happen in engineering also.

Of course the first response of a purist is to bash the way the system is running. After awhile, you realize that you cannot beat it and you join it. Hey initially, I didn’t like the fact that the person is working in the capacity of a software engineer and NEVER solved a derivative nor integral. In time, I put that behind me.

So I said all of that to say…it’s good to focus on the science but do not forget the business of everything around you. I think many musicians have said the same thing.

sakky · January 31, 2011, 11:45pm

Well, if you find it boring, surely you understand that you don’t have to read it. Just read the sections that are of interest to you. After all, there are plenty of threads and even sections within individual threads, that I don’t care about and hence don’t read.

Then that raises the question - of the IT people that you do know, where did they study? What was their major? After all, these people must have studied something.

sakky · January 31, 2011, 11:57pm

And now we’re getting somewhere. Your advice is aligned with what I’ve been saying: that highly theoretical, research-oriented coursework is less useful and probably should be de-emphasized as not being highly practical and marketable. My example again would be advanced algorithms, but if you still disagree, fine, then perhaps you could proffer some of your own.

Doing so would sharpen the advice to a crisp action plan: certain topics of study should be avoided if possible because they produce a low value-add. As career success is inherently a relative metric - as somebody will be stuck with the crappy jobs and the goal is to ensure that it’s not you - any actionable strategy plan must consist not only of an enumeration of what to learn, but, more importantly, what not to learn. It is by choosing not to learn certain things that allows you to differentiate yourself.

And as I said before, you started on this road before. You mentioned previously that learning compilers is not a highly value-added activity. I concur. {In fact, I would go so far as to say that the general topic of programming language design, including assemblers and interpreters, is not highly useful, as probably only a few hundred such jobs in the world exist. Students would probably be better off taking the database course that you mentioned.} What else is not useful?

The end goal should be a list of topics that are not high value-adds and that students should neglect in the name of efficiency. If students want to explore those topics for their own personal interest, that’s fine, but they should do so knowing that the market is unlikely to reward them for their efforts.

sakky · February 1, 2011, 12:15am

So let’s do that. And let’s put IT aside and discuss traditional engineering. I would pose the same question that I posed to GT. If you attend a low-ranked engineering program, what non-obvious but actionable steps should you take to maximize your chances of professional success? Specifically, what should you choose not to learn?

I’ll start. I would say that the Maxwell Relations of thermodynamics (note, not the Maxwell Equations but the Maxwell Relations) are not useful and students should spend as little time as possible in learning them, for, outside of academia, nobody actually uses them.

GLOBALTRAVELER · February 1, 2011, 12:37am

Well Sakky,

There are other things I picked up in my years in the “technical” industry in which I threw away the traditional path and went with what was more practical and marketable. I will list a few which are 1) my opinions and 2) will definitely morph into bigger debates:

1) A M.S. in Computer Science??..FOR WHAT? No specialization is 10 damn courses. Take Engineering Management or Systems Engineering or some interdisciplinary MEng/M.S. Engineering program which will allow some business/management related courses and still give you 4 to 5 courses in your technical specialization.

2) I learned that a MEng/M.S. + 10 years experience (after the degree) = MEng/M.S. + 10 years experience (before the degree). My graduation years have not been on my resume in about 15 years. Not one employer has EVER asked was I age 24 or age 32 when I received my M.S.

3) Good work experience + tuition checks/vouchers from your employer can sure reduce the required undergrad GPA and GRE metrics needed for grad school. Since you (the part-time student) do not count against the headcount doing research, the school doesn’t mind letting you take some not-so advanced graduate courses so you can earn a MEng degree.

4) Personal thing for me: My M.S. was a “check the box” activity…purely resume decoration and playing the corporate game.

I could go on but the gist is that your must also “play the game” and not have tunnel vision.

sakky · February 1, 2011, 1:05am

GT, again, that’s not bad, but I suspect that it still does not speak to the specific needs of most CC readers, who seem to still be students, whether in high school or college. For them, a discussion of ‘good’ work experience - whether appended or prepended with an MS - is putting the cart before the horse: the most relevant question to them is how do you obtain that good work experience in the first place, as opposed to, say, being stuck building bug fixes for obsolete software. You mentioned before that students should consider top consulting firms, but that devolves to the obvious recommendation of attending a top school. How should somebody attending a bottom-tier school enter a top consulting firm such as Booz?

Everybody wants a good job right out of college. Everybody wants a position where they can develop good work experience. But not everybody is going to get it. The question then is, how do you maximize your chances that you will be one of the people who does get it? What specifically and exactly should you as a student do differently - in particular, what should you choose not to learn - compared to the other students?

Like I said, GT, I’m not trying to badger you. I appreciate your message that those students who do not attend top colleges can nevertheless enjoy highly successful careers. But the unanswered question - the missing and key link - is how exactly do they go about doing so? How should they, despite not attending the best schools, nevertheless obtain top jobs and develop strong work experience? As long as these questions remain unanswered, then students at those schools will justifiably feel that they lack a clear and actionable pathway to success.

ucbalumnus · February 1, 2011, 1:06am

Probably because CS majors tend not to aspire to IT type of jobs, which are really not that interesting for someone who goes into CS because they are interested in it. Much of it is responding to users who broke the “cup holder” in their computer, forgot their password (even though it was a simple one that was flagged by the password cracker you ran on everyone’s passwords), saw a blue screen of death, griping about general slowness (that is not reproducible when you do the same thing), etc., or contacting vendors about problems which the users gave you insufficient information so the vendor cannot figure them out. Also, don’t forget your turn to be on-call 24/7.

The proliferation of various low level certifications in specific products also gives an appearance of ability among non-technical persons entering IT, even though they may not be able to solve any but the most ordinary problems covered in the certification tests.

Actually, in my first few jobs out of school, I did software projects from scratch that had to parse a non-trivial input language. The compiler design course proved to be useful for those projects.

What does being in a low ranked versus high ranked engineering program have to do with choosing what to learn or not (presuming you mean in terms of selecting courses and the like)? You still have similar choices either way. The high ranked engineering program may pack more content or theory into the courses, but there is not much the student can do about it once attending the school, other than perhaps study additional material on his/her own if s/he wants to learn it.

Probably the biggest difference is that, in the low ranked engineering program, you are likely to have to be more aggressive about searching for non-local employers to apply to for jobs, in contrast to a high ranking engineering program that tends to attract non-local employers to its recruiting fairs.

Are these now included in introductory physics sequences? Or only in advanced thermodynamics courses that physics and mechanical engineering majors take?

ucbalumnus · February 1, 2011, 1:15am

Try to time your graduation during improving economic times for the industry. Someone in 2008, seeing the real estate / construction bubble popping, on track to graduate in 2009 in civil engineering may have wanted to consider graduate school or (if finances allow) stretching out undergraduate in order to avoid graduating straight into the unemployment line. Yes, easier said than done in many cases, but the timing of your graduation date in relation to the economic and industry cycles has a very large effect on your job and career prospects – indeed, those entering the work force during a recession tend to lag non-recession entrants even a decade into their careers.

Why pose it in the choice of what not to learn, unless you are making a roundabout argument for freeing up schedule space to learn something else? Better to prioritize what you want to learn; then if there is not enough schedule space, eliminate the things that you less want to learn (and are not required to graduate).

sakky · February 1, 2011, 1:44am

Yeah, but it’s not clear to me that those who stretched out their undergrad educations - without commensurate work experience - are any better off. {Granted, I categorically agree about the graduate school strategy, and indeed, grad school applications vary strongly and inversely with the state of the economy.}

For example, while it is certainly true that graduating in the face of a recession will hurt your long-term career, it’s not clear to me that stretching out your undergraduate years is any better. The guy who graduated into the teeth of a recession is still likely to pick up some work experience, however unfulfilling it may be. After all, even at its harshest state, the national unemployment rate during the downturn never exceeded 11-12%, meaning that the vast majority of the labor force still had some sort of job, even if only a low-end one. That seems to be better than no job at all, which is what you would presumably have if you remained in undergrad as part of a delaying strategy.

Where I might agree with you - but may only be a workable strategy within IT and CS - is to withdraw from school in order to take a promising job opportunity, and then possibly later re-enroll at school as necessary. This seems to be the career strategy pursued by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg - if Microsoft or Facebook had failed, oh well, they just re-enroll at Harvard, who will hold your seat for you. {As a point of contrast, Elisabeth Shue left Harvard for an Academy-Award nominated acting career only to finally return 15 years later to finish her degree at age 36.}

Hence, if you’re pursuing a CS or IT degree at a time when those fields are hot, as during the dotcom boom of the late 90’s or the ‘social-networking boom’ right now, you can withdraw from school to pursue that boom, and if you succeed, you may never need to finish your degree. If the boom turns to bust, oh well, you just return to school. The key is that you didn’t simply stretch out your undergrad years, but that you obtained useful work experience, along with a chance, as per Gates or Zuckerberg, to become a billionaire.

Because that’s not obvious, and not obvious (but correct and actionable) advice is the most useful of advice. After all, everybody talks about what you should learn. What is more useful is to specifically discuss what you should not learn. To recommend everything is to recommend nothing.

That’s exactly what I’m saying. After all, let’s face it, each one of us has a limited capacity for learning, however much we may wish otherwise. What is then important is to not spend time learning topics that are not useful so that you have more time to learn what is useful. But that requires identifying those topics.

Fine, have it your way, what should students prioritize the least? That is to say, what are the topics that you should spend the least amount of time learning, because the market accords little value to them?

The key issue is that you can’t simply pursue whatever you like. You have to provide what employers want. Nor are employers entirely diffuse in their requirements - their desires tend to be correlated. Hence, there are certain skills that employers tend to accord the greatest value, and others that employers accord the least value. An actionable strategy plan would be to identify those skills - especially the least valuable skills - so that students can allocate their resources accordingly.

ucbalumnus · February 1, 2011, 2:11am

New entrants to the labor force tend to have much higher unemployment rates than the labor force as a whole, since the incumbent employees, even if less qualified than unemployed people applying for jobs (but not unsatisfactory), tend to be kept in their jobs.

UC Berkeley’s career center notes that only 19% of 2009 civil engineering graduates surveyed had full time employment, versus 48% seeking employment (the rest in graduate school or “other”). For comparison, in 2006 (the real estate / construction bubble), civil engineering graduates reported 49% full time employment, versus 2% seeking employment.

Being unemployed for six months or a year or more (common in the most recent recession) can be very damaging to one’s ability to get a job as the economy or industry recovers – employers tend to look at the long term unemployed as being “damaged goods” (skills deteriorating from non-use, and “something must be wrong if no one else hired them”). Better to have spent an extra semester or year in undergraduate than unemployed, if it allows graduating into a better job market (though it may not be that much better). Of course, if going to graduate school is possible, that would be preferable to spending an extra year in undergraduate to avoid entering a very bad job market.

Yes, the withdraw to get a good job during a boom/bubble and re-enter school later strategy is also a valid one.

However, there is no way that any student can take all or even most of the courses available at a university. So it is implied that most of the available courses will end up being in the “not taken” category.

And it is often the case that the “should learn” list still does not fill the student’s entire schedule, so the student has free elective space to take courses which may be seen as “frivolous” to his/her post-graduation goals. So it is not necessarily the case that a student has so little schedule space that even one “frivolous” course would be crowding out something very useful.

Obviously, that depends on what your goals are (including what major). Even if you restrict it to CS and IT jobs after graduation (as opposed to graduate school, finance jobs, etc.), there is quite a bit of difference between the different types of jobs, so “it depends”.

hadsed · February 1, 2011, 2:37am

The funny thing is that even if he gives any advice, it would might end up being totally useless by the time high school kids get to the job market with their degrees. What happens when people find out what’s in demand? The market gets flooded of course, and it’s not in demand anymore. Now of course there are barriers to certain fields, like defense. Security clearances don’t seem to be particularly simple to obtain. But this kind of speaks more generally about what people should be doing to be ‘successful’, and that is to just do something that no one else really does.

I mean, who ever knew that getting a physics Ph.D studying fluid dynamics could land you a job on Wall St.? Computer scientists studying artificial intelligence too, along with geneticists, mathematical biologists, etc. Turns out that people who know that sort of thing are really useful in a lot of areas. It seems to work the same way in defense, with engineers working in IT. At that point you should really be focusing on other things. I’ve never heard of an engineer or scientist being homeless or anything (besides the tomfoolery that goes on in journalism, I wouldn’t put too much faith in those stories personally).

I just don’t understand how you (not you specifically, just people who ask these questions) can expect a reasonable answer when you’re asking a question that basically goes like, ‘what can I do in life to be successful?’.

sakky · February 1, 2011, 2:57am

You don’t have to mention when you graduated, and you can always fill your resume time-gap with something. For example, you can always say that, right after graduation, you spent 6 months to a year traveling around the world. How would employers know that you didn’t? You can say that you tried to start a company that failed…again, how would they know otherwise? You can always enroll at community college and then say that you wanted to learn some additional skills such as foreign languages that you never picked up while an undergrad.

I’m not simply talking about specific courses to take or not, but rather topics within those courses that you do take. The truth is, in any course, there are topics that you don’t really need to know well, and with which it suffices to simply know enough to pass the exam (without actually understanding what they mean). For example, to this day, I still don’t really understand what the Maxwell Relations actually mean, and I’ve never met a single employer who has actually cared.

Again, this discussion is not restricted to discrete courses, but about any sort of life skill which can be obtained by any means.

As a case in point, I have found that one of the most singularly useful, versatile, and portable life skills you can ever have is public speaking. Unfortunately, it is a skill that few colleges actually teach as a specific and formal course (which is ironic considering how necessary public speaking is to success within the academic and research environment). Hence, I would recommend, rather than join your engineering club or other such ‘discipline-focused’ extracurricular activity, join your local Toastmasters Club. Learn how to give powerful speeches and present in public.

Here’s another. Prioritize courses that have you develop a final paper or project of publishable quality - even if only in a non-peer reviewed, undergraduate oriented publication - rather than take a final exam. A strong final paper or project is something that you can list on your resume, especially if converted into a true pub. But, frankly, you can’t do anything with a final exam.

As a clear example of this, I know a group of MIT students who took the Product Design and Development course with the specific goal of building a patentable device. Now they have that patent. Granted, the patent wasn’t officially granted until years after they took the course, and they had to spend their own money and additional effort in filing that patent. But hey, now they actually have their own patent. It’s not shared with any faculty, and it’s not licensed under MIT, because they did all of the work themselves. How many other graduating students can say that they have their own patent? {Meanwhile, plenty of other students took exam-oriented courses which are now functionally useless to them, as they have nothing to show for it.}

And there it is again: to recommend everything or to say "it depends’ is to recommend nothing. How is somebody who is attending a low-ranked school yet is hoping to be successful supposed to feel when he can’t get a clear answer on how to strategically advance his career?

If you truly feel that the pathway to success is contingent upon the major or the desired job, then fine, offer a contingent answer. You could say: “For job X or major Y, prioritize A,B, and C and spend as little time as possible on D,E, and F.”

That’s how to offer useful advice. Give people a clear plan of non-obvious but actionable steps. Don’t just hide behind such palaver as: “It depends” or “Do your best” or “Work hard”. People need specific and clear actionable steps.

Otherwise, students at the lower-end schools are entirely justified in feeling that they don’t have a clear strategy to succeed.

sakky · February 1, 2011, 3:18am

I’m hardly so egotistical as to think that anything said on CC will shift the entire labor market. Even if we do clearly enumerate the keys to success, honestly, how many people are actually going to read it here?

Furthermore, let’s face it, most students won’t follow advice regarding the marketability of specific skills whether we identify them or not. For example, engineering degrees have long enjoyed higher pay than humanities degrees do, and will surely continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This is no secret. Yet the fact remains that far more Americans major in the humanities than in engineering. So if we enumerate certain skills that people should and should not learn to improve their marketability, only a small minority will actually heed that advice.

Skills demand is never entirely stochastic. For example, I can’t think of a single time in history when the Maxwell Relations were ever actually useful outside of academia, nor, frankly, do I ever think they will be.

And that’s my point exactly. What is it that you should be doing that others are not. More pointedly, what should you not be doing, that others are?

Well, actually, that shift had been long predicted, as the realm of finance became more mathematical. Generally speaking, quantitative skills are becoming more marketable over time. But not just any quant skills, but especially those emphasizing computational and statistical principles. {For this reason, I wish more engineering programs would teach more statistics - and not just ‘chalkboard statistics’, but how to use actual statistical software packages such as SAS, Stata, or R/S+. These are highly marketable life skills - you can enjoy a quite lucrative career as a SAS programmer.}

But on the other hand, I think we can safely assume that, at least in the foreseeable future, somebody landing a PhD in English from a no-name school is probably not going to obtain a Wall Street job. There are plenty of skills that, frankly, have never been highly marketable, and probably never will be, at least, not in our lifetimes.

Then we’re right back to where we started: no clear pathway to success exists for those students attending low-ranked schools, and they’re right to despair for their futures. Many of them justifiably fear being stuck in low-end, low-opportunity jobs for the rest of their lives because they didn’t attend a top school, but how can we allay those fears if we can’t offer them a clear pathway out?

ucbalumnus · February 1, 2011, 11:14am

In what course did you have to learn Maxwell Relations (thermodynamics)?

However, the questions you are trying to get people to answer, like “what courses to take / not take?” and “what material in the courses to emphasize really learning (as opposed to learning just enough for the test)?” are questions that apply regardless of high ranked or low ranked school. So do such things as public speaking / Toastmasters, going to graduate school to avoid looking for a job in the depths of a recession, etc…

In case you missed it, the point I mentioned above with respect to recruiting is probably the biggest difference that the student can do something about. Out of area employers may be more aggressive in recruiting at high ranked schools. At low ranked schools, the students have to be more aggressive at finding employers. Another possibility in this area is that a student at a low ranked school doing well enough to be able to go to a graduate school that is either higher ranked or local to desired employers.

And note that just going to a high ranked school does not guarantee a good job or rewarding career.

What is your advice to students at low ranked schools (to the extent that it differs from your advice to students at high ranked schools), or students in general?

sakky · February 1, 2011, 12:46pm

Naturally, in the chemical thermodynamics course: ChE 141.

For example: 
*Outcomes: Students must be able to…

…Relate thermodynamic properties via partial derivatives, Maxwell’s relations*

<a href=“http://chemistry.berkeley.edu/student_info/USLI/pdf/USLI_Chm_Eng_141.pdf[/url]”>http://chemistry.berkeley.edu/student_info/USLI/pdf/USLI_Chm_Eng_141.pdf</a>

My question has always been: why? Outside of academia, no engineer that I’ve ever encountered ever actually uses the Maxwell Relations. Heck, the vast majority of engineers even within academia don’t use them either. I will always remember a top engineering student and went on to receive her PhD in a mere 3 years and who was asked to be a TA for thermo yet had to turn it down because in her words: “She would actually have to understand the Maxwell Relations,” which she clearly did not. Nobody that I know - and I know plenty of engineers - even knows what the Maxwell Relations mean.

I agree that that advice applies to most students. But it applies to students at low-ranked schools most of all. Students at top schools, perhaps foolhardily, tend to believe that the prestige of their school will parley to their desired job. Whatever misplaced confidence they may have is not the topic of discussion on this thread.

What is the topic of discussion is how students at low-ranked schools should feel about their job prospects. Indeed that seems to be the impetus of the OP’s question: ‘Does school really matter?’. The answer may well be ‘No’, but only if we can identify a clear pathway to success for those students. Otherwise, they will continue to believe that their job prospects will be dampened because they went to a lower-ranked school.

Well, I don’t think that’s actually my job. After all, I was not the one who proposed the notion that low-ranked school students can nevertheless achieve great success. GT did - and indeed is living proof of it - so I am simply asking that he identify a clear pathway for others.

But to your point, I would argue that low-ranked school students should place greater weight on practical skills and less on the theoretical aspects that employers seem to care little about. Happily, lower-ranked schools tend to place less emphasis on that theory, perhaps under the notion that vocational skills are to be emphasized at such schools (and vocational skills are what most employers actually want).

Here’s a case in point. San Jose State actually has a Cisco networking lab on campus and made available for use to the students. They can use it to learn enough to earn marketable Cisco certifications, including even the high-paying Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert certificates. Berkeley does not offer this. Why the heck not? How ridiculous is that? A San Jose State graduate with a CCIE - even a humanities major - will almost certainly be paid significantly more than will a Berkeley engineering graduate.

[SJSU</a> Cisco Networking Lab](<a href=“http://www.engr.sjsu.edu/ciscolab/general.htm]SJSU”>http://www.engr.sjsu.edu/ciscolab/general.htm)

Now, to be fair, Berkeley obviously has resources that SJSU does not have. For example, Berkeley offers the impressive Stat 133 course which teaches the actual usage of R, MySQL, and CGI to manipulate statistical data and build database-driven Web applications. That represents a prime package of highly useful and marketable skills. Even more enticingly, the course has no prereqs. That is precisely the sort of course that Berkeley should offer more of. I would say that every Berkeley student - even the humanities students - should seriously consider taking this course, even if only on a P/NP basis. To my knowledge, SJSU has no equivalent.

But the key is to leave any particular course or school activity with a tangible output, whether that be an actual set of marketable skills, a certification (or the potential to earn a certification), a publishable paper or patent application (or the potential to develop one), etc. Those are the sorts of skills you should emphasize.

ucbalumnus · February 1, 2011, 10:06pm

Your comment about Maxwell Relations appears specific to chemical engineering majors, as opposed to engineering majors in general (though it is possible that mechanical engineering or physics majors may encounter it in their upper division thermodynamics courses).

Regarding SJSU’s lab to practice for the CCIE: Yes, take advantage of all of the resources that your school offers. But that applies whether the school is high ranked or low ranked.

Regarding theory versus practical / vocational skills: Someone with a solid background in the theory can more easily learn related practical / vocational skills as technology changes in the future. Now, you can’t be all theory with no idea of how to apply it, but there are way too many (particularly in the IT field with little technical skills other than some low level (not CCIE) certifications) who are not adaptable to changing technologies or unanticipated problems.

sakky · February 3, 2011, 8:18am

And I’m quite certain that other engineering disciplines also teach plenty of topics that most graduates heading to industry, frankly, never really need to know.

Heck, there have been several threads discussing precisely this subject. GT had previously mentioned that practically nobody actually uses compiler theory. So why learn it, if you could learn something more practical?

And it seems to be notable that “lower-ranked” schools may offer a wider range of practical skills than the higher-ranked schools that tend to be more research and theory-oriented.

But that gets to the goal of my participation in this thread: let’s identify a clear pathway of success for students at lower-ranked schools. Students at SJSU have one: milk that Cisco lab for all it’s worth, leveraging it to earn multiple flavors of the CCIE or even the top-end CCA cert.

All of the engineers in industry that I know are still waiting for even the slightest possible usage of the Maxwell Relations. I’ve advised them not to hold their breaths, for I don’t think they will ever be useful. Heck, even most of the engineers in academia I know not only never use them, they can barely even remember what they are due to disuse.

But I wasn’t talking about low-level certifications. I was talking about the strong ones, on par with the CCIE, for which there certainly not “way too many” from a market standpoint. A CCIE right out of college with even just a creampuff humanities degree will probably make more than most newly minted engineers. Heck, a CCIE right out of high school will probably make more than many new engineers (and it is indeed feasible for a reasonably motivated high school kid to become a CCIE, for nothing on the certification exam is particularly difficult to understand). Surely we can agree that any high school student who has the wherewithal to get into Berkeley or other top college clearly has the capability of earning a CCIE or other top IT certificate. I don’t think that’s even a close call.

However adaptable a theory-heavy engineering degree may be, the fact is, whether we like it or not, the market doesn’t really seem to reward that type of knowledge. I wish it did, but it does not. Instead, the market rewards practical skills. Hence, by virtue of market signaling, if there is any type of education that is being excessively supplied, it is the theoretical type.

But I agree with a prior poster that the purpose of this subthread is not to fixate upon IT (or software engineering) repeatedly, but to also discuss the career possibilities within the traditional engineering disciplines. So again I ask: what are the clear, non-obvious but actionable steps that an engineering student at a low-ranked student could take to boost his marketability? Specifically, what should students not be doing? And I don’t mean trite palaver such as “Don’t be lazy”, but actual non-obvious steps that students could reasonably take. If we are to truly add value as CC posters, that is what we should be discussing.

Otherwise, we’re just dancing around bromides that people already know.

ucbalumnus · February 3, 2011, 11:34am

Perhaps nobody in his subarea (IT consulting).

I used it in a few different jobs in the process of writing software that had to parse non-trivial input languages.

You keep complaining about Maxwell Relations. Did you actually spend a lot of time learning them? Did all of the engineers in industry (presumably you mean chemical engineers, since there is no reason to expect other types of engineers who do not take advanced thermodynamics to have encountered them) spend a lot of time learning them in school?

Perhaps they have the capability – but a CCIE is not completely trivial, or else there would be a lot more of them (as opposed to the flood of people with the various low level certifications). Do you have a CCIE, since you appear to think it is an easy ticket to a well paying job?

The market rewards practical skills[li], but the person who does not know enough of the theory will have a much harder time self-learning to adapt to changing technologies, and will see his/her skills become obsolete more quickly.[/li]
[*] Partly because it is hard to assess a candidate’s ability to learn something new during a short interview, even though ability to learn something new is extremely valuable in many jobs.

ucbalumnus · February 3, 2011, 11:46am

What is your answer here? (beside complaining about Maxwell Relations)

Other than general (theoretical?) answers like “make use of what your school has to offer”, the practical application will depend on the student, major, and school. Indeed applying general principles and theories to specific practical applications is a skill that that will serve a person well throughout his/her school and career.

sakky · February 3, 2011, 1:48pm

And exactly how much of the theory did you use?

Darn right I did. We all did. We had to; * as they were a prime component of the weeders*. The choice was stark: learn them or fail.

In fact, *I have several<a href=“there%20are%20multiple%20flavors%20of%20the%20CCIE”>/i</a>. And I can tell you, there is absolutely no comparison between all of them combined, and earning an engineering degree. Like I said, I know even some high school dropouts who are CCIE’s.

I agree that the CCIE is not trivial only in the sense that people don’t even know how to start studying for it - and I only was luckily exposed to the field because of a specific job that I stumbled into. But I would argue that it’s the job of the school to provide that type of exposure to various opportunities. SJSU is certainly doing so. How many Berkeley engineers would become CCIE’s if they had access to SJSU’s lab?

But now that we’ve settled the question about whether I have the CCIE, does that change your mind about how easy it is, relative to a Berkeley engineering degree?

I’m afraid that I still don’t see it. Again, taking the example of IT, I would venture to say that most IT workers - including many of the highest paid ones - do not hold degrees in CS or in IT. They seem to lack a theoretical base in their chosen field. But it hardly seems to hurt them. Frankly speaking, you don’t need much of a theoretical base in that industry.

Consider another field. As has been discussed numerous times on other threads, plenty of non-econ/business majors take jobs in finance and consulting, as long as they come from high-prestige schools. Seems to me that they suffer from both a lack of theoretical knowledge base and practical skills that are relevant to those jobs - but it hardly seems to hurt them, and if it did, then it would raise the question of why those firms would hire those students in the first place. {It perplexes me still as to why Goldman would hire a history major from Harvard, but the fact is, they do.}

Yet given the fact that those engineering students from top eng programs supposedly do have the proven ability to learn new topics, you would think that employers would eventually have figured this out and would therefore pay an appropriate premium. So why don’t? Yes, I agree that companies can be dumb, but are they really that dumb?

Again, why is that my job to provide that answer? I was not the one proposing the notion that students at lower-ranked schools do have the same opportunities as students at high-ranked schools. Go take it up with the people who actually proposed that notion.

Actually, I think I have provided plenty. Avoid your school’s theoretical courses, however much your professors might tout them. Instead, emphasize your school’s courses that provide practical skills. If possible, even petition that you trade some of your program’s upper-division courses for practical courses, as many programs are more flexible than you may think. For example, I suspect that many Berkeley engineering students probably could successfully trade one of their engineering or math courses for Stat 133.

The other, admittedly sad, piece of advice I could provide is simply not to major in engineering at all. Instead, major in a creampuff subject that takes up little time while learning IT and practical software skills on the side. Like I said, most IT workers did not major in IT or CS, and even many successful software developers did not actually major in CS.

So now I think I’ve provided some non-obvious advice, even though that was never my job anyway. How about you? What do you have to offer?

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