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<p>Good for you. And I am quite confident that I have a strong grasp upon the topic as well. </p>
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<p>Now we’re having a real discussion rather than merely engaging in a silly macho contest about whose school is better (which, trust me, you’re not going to win). </p>
<p>And I agree with you that what you said is what engineering education hopes to do. But man can’t live on hope alone. The real question is, does engineering education actually provide (rather merely hope to provide) the intellectual foundation necessary for future creativity? To me, that’s very much an open question. </p>
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If you ever saw the movie Apollo 13, the engineers in the movie were depicted in creating all kinds of ad-hoc solutions to seemingly impossible problems, like building a C02 extractor with socks, paper and tapes. That was creativity in engineering at its best.[ /quote]</p>
<p>Indeed, that was engineering creativity at its best - which happened to be conducted at NASA during the 1960’s which (presumably) recruited the very best engineers in the world who were picked precisely for their creative potential. But what about the average engineers - that is to say, all the engineers that NASA and other elite tech employers didn’t recruit? How creative are those engineers? </p>
<p>And that’s the real question - not how creative are a highly elite and exactingly selected group of engineers - but rather how creative is the average engineer? To only look at NASA and other high-end employers is to sample on the dependent variable.</p>