To be fair, no set of all courses will ever be of interest to any given employer. The only times I have ever seen that over 80% of the coursework ever applied directly to the job was the few people I know who had a conditional employment arrangement in which they learned under the direction of the company. The goal of an education is not to learn exactly what you need on the job, but to learn a broad base of knowledge that will be useful in a wide range of professions, along with enough specialist knowledge that can be applied to the job you specifically want to do.
And incidentally, art is useful for engineering aesthetics, and economics is useful for… engineering economics. Specialist knowledge without a strong base of general knowledge won’t get you far, and a lot of generally useful classes (with the exception of not serious classes like “underwater basket weaving”) will actually work their way into the job. Geology might be useful for working in oil, any foreign language (especially any of the top five) will be useful if you ever work with immigrants or with people from other countries, some neat elective may have a niche but valuable contribution to your job, and “overly theoretical” classes may give you some depth of understanding you would not have without it.
All of these scenarios seem like a longshot, but the entire point of an education is to teach you to be able to cast a wide net and to learn more than just the things that are instantaneously applicable to your next job. You never know exactly what will be useful (I’ve gotten offers from employers for very surprising things they noticed on my resume that I thought were absolutely trivial but were skills that were both important and rare), and a lot of things that seem useful now won’t be as useful as you thought. Overspecialization makes for a very narrow career path, especially if you just so happen to choose a specialty that is less marketable than you would have hoped.
Wow. No one said OP can’t take French classes. But why get bogged down in the full repertory needed for an official minor? You don’t get a hiring prize for a double major plus a minor. Nor a major and two minors. You get hired well based on how astute and experienced you are for the jobs you go after.
Same can go for the CS. Take x classes that prepare you, that enhance your skill set. You don’t need to take every single requirement and get it on a diploma.
I’d use the extra energy to get research opps and summer internships.
The implication here is that any classes taken towards a personal interest detract from the major and your future career in a big way, which simply isn’t true as long as you don’t neglect your core course material.
This, for example:
isn’t always true. Many job offers are given for specific non-engineering accomplishments that happen to be relevant to the job in question. Engineering jobs don’t consist of just the technical side and while it is true that it’s harder to make up technical deficiencies than most other skills, a lot of people underestimate how valuable those other skills are (though the reverse, nontechnical people underestimating the importance of technical skills, is probably even more prominent).
My point was not that they will not care about non-engineering, humanizing, well rounding stuff. Certainly those things are important if not to the next employer, to the individual’s well being. It was that those activities have little added value if taken to the nth degree just to check off all the boxes to get a minor listed on the diploma.
And you think it is the responsibility of engineering managers to correct that? There isn’t a guild here setting policies, the arms race was created by the universities and the students, employers are just taking advantage of it!
No argument there at all! Where I disagree is that those interests deserve a place on your resume via your transcript. For an engineer, your starting transcript is one of the biggest parts of your resume, and how you treat your college years suggests (to many, if not all employers) how you will treat your years of employment. There is a line between “focused individual with healthy outside interests” and “person trying to just do enough in engineering so that they can embrace their TRUE passion of (insert other major/minor here)”, and the point is to know that your transcript is a large part of how potential employers figure out which side of that line you are on.
Learn a language, study art, play an instrument. But if you are taking more of those college classes than you need to, and aren’t showing a high GPA, solid engineering courseload, and good internships or research, then you are going to be at a disadvantage compared to someone who used those credits to bolster one of those areas while pursuing their other interests in a less formalized and time-consuming fashion.
It is absolutely true that there LOTS of reasons why people get job offers, and that there are LOTS of engineering-related jobs besides design engineering. Many of these initial jobs can lead to highly lucrative and enjoyable careers, and many of them require distinctly non-traditional-engineering skills. It is worthwhile, however, to understand that most of these jobs are just as available to design engineers, that most of them pay less than design engineering (at first), and that they are the first kinds of jobs to be cut when profit margins dip. If these are jobs you want, that is absolutely fine, but there is no point in ignoring the reality of the engineering job market.
In principle, we agree on the fact that there has to be a balance between personal interests and engineering coursework, that doing the bare minimum to graduate is not enough (this is, by the way, a failure of universities to support their own students), and that you have to cultivate a strong technical background for the sake of employment. However, where I can’t agree is the assertion, possibly explicit but more so implied by the context of your posts, that engineering technical skills are all that matter, and that anything else is just a distraction that has nothing to do with employment, that isn’t even worth putting on your resume. That assertion is just straight up incorrect.
Employers are people, so we can’t really speak in full generality about what all of them do. Furthermore, it’s hard for any of us to speak past our own experiences because we all have our own unique set of circumstances and I doubt that too many people have a very unbiased and thorough understanding of all circumstances. That said, nontechnical skills are very important, both for “design engineering” and any other engineering job, and if you undervalue these skills then you will limit what you are able to accomplish. The value of being “just an engineer” who knows little more than how to tinker with a certain piece of technology is low - and incidentally, those jobs are pretty strongly at risk if you just so happen to work towards being the world’s expert in a waning or out-of-favor technology. I do agree that in principle engineers are perfectly capable of moving laterally and vertically, but in reality you move based on what you are capable of (which is directly a result of what skills you chose to cultivate).
I know many employers who prefer to work with real people, as opposed to “engineers who only know engineering.” Given that engineering is a group effort for any project that is not trivial, that’s a reasonable preference. In that light, having interesting (and often indirectly useful) side skills is very good and beneficial. So is having interesting hobbies that you could talk about when asked in an interview (for reference, answering “what do you do in your spare time?” with a variation of, “I live and breathe engineering” makes you sound like a loser). Design, especially at anything but a starter level, involves a lot of skills that are not strictly technical. And while it’s nice to have directly relevant experience towards a job you’re applying for (of which there are many kinds, not just technical work), as a student your body of knowledge is relatively low and you’re being recruited primarily on potential. And the potential of someone who is deficient in some other way (only knows engineering, too narrow-minded or too distracted, can’t do engineering work, difficult to work with, etc) is not all that great.
If you come in with a lot of credits (e.g., AP credits, transfer credits), it can be doable in 4 years. However, doing a double minor can easily result in you taking a fifth year. In my honest opinion, I don’t think the tuition for the extra semester(s) will get you any additional returns.
My advice is to just take some classes in those areas that interest you. You don’t necessarily need to complete the actual minors. A minor doesn’t do much for you, and it most likely will not even show up on your diploma.
I did not say “engineering technical skills are all that matter”, but the list of skills and characteristics that DO matter to the majority of employers is relatively narrow. Besides the design skills you also need to have interpersonal skills, and time-management skills, and you need to be able to speak and present to customers and colleagues, and it certainly helps if you are an interesting person with a breadth of knowledge and experience… but realistically, those things don’t generally require extra coursework or a minor to achieve. There is a difference between “having a hobby” and “letting your hobby interfere with your career”, and that is the point I am trying to make.
No one can speak about what all of them do, and no one is trying. I once knew a manager who actively looked for good softball players to hire because he had an ongoing softball rivalry with a few other managers and was constantly looking to improve his team, but that doesn’t mean that engineering students should start joining softball leagues! There are, however, definite trends that appear in hiring, and this is what I (and a few others) are talking about. No matter what you do, there will almost certainly be someone out there willing, perhaps even eager to hire you, but the more employers turned off by your resume the harder the time you will have getting a job, and the less it will tend to pay.
We do all have different sets of experiences, and all I can tell you is that I have been an engineer for a decade and was a technician for a decade before that, and I have participated in hiring discussions with dozens of managers in several different companies without ever hearing someone pushed for a job because of their worldliness or because of their not-directly-applicable coursework. There have been a few other voices in this thread with decades more experience, and they are saying similar things.
I think you need to specify what “nontechnical skills” you mean here, and how coursework is required to obtain them.
No engineer should ever focus their technical skills so narrowly that they are unable to transition to a new technology, but that is an entirely technical issue that is not germane to the subject at hand.
Absolutely, but there are a lot of shades in that spectrum, and as much as “real people” are nice, there are lots and lots of “real people” who got their assorted other skills without taking a bunch of non-engineering coursework, instead taking more engineering coursework which gave them better engineering chops and making them more likely to get the job done. Seriously, the decision to NOT take that extra Art History class or to skip the entrepreneurship minor doesn’t turn one into a closet-case who just sits in a cubicle doing designs and not talking to anyone. I’ve known engineers with vastly diverse interests, and they still had focused educations in engineering.
No one here is advocating that someone say that or live like that. If you genuinely do live and breathe engineering (and I’ve known one or two engineers that really do… and I should note that they are fantastically effective, highly valued, and very well paid!) that’s great, you’re doing what you love. If not, that’s fine too. Just don’t show up looking like your outside interests are so involved that they detract from your engineering performance.
Again, I would like to see what kind of skills you are talking about, and how they relate to the question of non-engineering coursework that started this thread.