benefits – Engineering Revision

All right, so if I’m to author a book about engineering careers (intended for high-schoolers and their non-engineer parents), I need some sort of rough outline to serve as a starting point. To that end I’m mulling over some potential chapters topics (all of which currently come to me in question form…):

What is engineering?
What do engineers do?
What aptitudes are found in engineers?
Which engineering sub-discipline should I choose?
Is engineering a good career choice?
What training do engineers require?
Will I need to be licensed to work as an engineer?
What earning power do engineers possess?
Are engineers happy?
What is the future of engineering?
How do I get into a good engineering school?
What are employers looking for in engineering candidates?
How do engineers think?
What are the downsides of an engineering career?
What are the social implications of being an engineer?
What will drive me crazy if I become an engineer?

There are a lot of existing references about engineering careers, but it turns out that few people have really investigated what engineers do in the workplace. Therefore, many descriptions of engineering responsibilities emphasize design and analysis, even though a small percentage of engineers participate in these activities on more than an occasional basis. (See “Are we accidentally misleading students about engineering practice?” [pdf] by Dr. James Trevelyan, 2011 Research in Engineering Education Symposium, Madrid.) I’d like to provide a more realistic view of engineering practice, and to emphasize the value of engineering problem solving in fields outside “traditional” engineering vocations.

Potential references:

Educating Engineers: A listing of engineering schools by state, as well as a description of various engineering career opportunities.
Discover Engineering: Site established by DiscoverE (formerly the National Engineers Week Foundation) “to sustain and grow a dynamic engineering profession through outreach, education, celebration, and volunteerism.”
A Career in Engineering: Description of an engineer’s professional responsibilities, written by the Wall Street Journal.
Engineering Careers: A long list of engineering sub-disciplines provided by Study.com.
Architecture and Engineering Occupations: Data on engineering employment and salaries provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Feel free to use the contact page to provide me with additional chapter topics and/or career planning resources!

My prior post was critical of the abstraction-based, mathematics-heavy, and computation-focused eduction served up to today’s engineering students. It has been my experience has been that the most successful engineers in industrial practice are very hands-on, with years of practical experience, and insights that have little to do with academic equations. That’s not to say that the academic abstractions are unimportant, for they provide the language of discussion. An intelligent conversation about, say, a motor drive system, requires participants to understand that additional motor horsepower is not necessarily needed to produce greater output torque. (An engineer friend recently shared with me his attempt to explain this to a non-engineer boss. In the end, the boss said, “This doesn’t make any sense to me, but if you say it’s so, it must be.”)

Despite possible shortcomings in the current methods of engineering education, today’s graduates continue to be hired, and paid well-above average salaries—so employers obviously benefit from bringing on students who survive the current curriculum. Whatever modifications I might advocate for improving engineering pedagogy, I would certainly hope not to abandon these beneficial characteristics of today’s engineering programs. So what does an engineer learn from dealing with high levels of abstraction?

Perseverance — It often takes hours, maybe even days, to work through a single homework assignment. One has to look at each problem statement and begin trying to match the available information with potential methods of solution. Often times, roadblocks in understanding are encountered. The instructional material needs to be re-read, and re-evaluated to build a more comprehensive understanding of the solution technique. If the solution is not already known (from prior semester homework files, or found online), then a student has to at least convince themself that their path of deduction and computation is logical and rational. Shortcuts in this process are rarely rewarded in the long run, and engineering students rarely make it past their sophomore year if they haven’t acquired a healthy dose of perseverance.
Emotional suppression — Solving math problems is not a matter of nuance, or persuasion. It doesn’t matter how mad you get, or how optimistic you may be. Either your solution works, or it doesn’t. A successful student learns to keep cranking away at a problem until the correct solution is found, regardless of their emotional state.
Delayed gratification — Not withstanding the time spent working individual problems, engineers have to spend several years working on fundamentals before they can begin to solve higher-order engineering problems. Want to study photography? Grab a camera and go take some pictures. Want to be a writer? Start a blog. Want to be a civil engineer? Then expect to take four semesters of prerequisite courses to get to the point where you can begin seriously talking about bridge construction. In fact, your four years in engineering school are just a warm-up for going into industry, where you have to learn how engineering is carried out in the real world.
Humility — Solving complex math problems leads one to be wary of false optimism. A dropped sign, a transposed notation, a forgotten property, a misunderstood application—all can lead to an incorrect solution, even though the methodology seems correct. This aspect of the engineering education has been well-stated by Vivek Haldar:

To be a successful software engineer (or indeed, any engineer), one first needs to be utterly and completely broken by failure. One must be so humiliated by a complex system that they give up and realize that the only chance of moving forward comes from being a supplicant to the complexity, by approaching it with humility and caution, not with hubris. You have to listen to the system, coax it into behaving. Commanding it does not work.
Sub-problem identification — Getting the hang of breaking complex problems into solvable sub-problems is an important engineering skill. My understanding of how this could be accomplished came in the second half of my sophomore year. No longer did I have to look for an equation or method that solved an entire problem at once; I could break the problem into smaller parts and solve the sub-problems individually. This was my first inkling that I might actually be able to “think” like an engineer.

Any other benefits to a traditional engineering education that I’ve missed?