Tag: roles

Categories
Engineering Revision

Bait and switch in engineering education

It seems that many children have never considered the possibility of an engineering career. Well-meaning programs therefore attempt to nudge students toward engineering through exposure to engineering-like projects. These activities most often involve the manipulation of physical objects, such as constructing toothpick bridges, building LEGO models, preparing for an egg drop, or working with robots. Youngsters may alternatively be presented with a simulation of working with physical objects. As I’ve stated before, the role of an engineer is to implement new methods, devices, or systems. For an engineer working in the physical realm (a physineer), this means constructing something novel in the material world. So I have no problem with these introductory programs attempting to capture the imagination of students with physical-realm activities. My concern is the abrupt switch to purely abstract thinking that we impose on those who have expressed a desire to pursue an engineering career.

When students are sent off to college, they are immediately thrown into a series of math and physics courses that can seem wholly irrelevant to the activities that enticed them to enter the engineering curriculum. Although my undergrad experience took place more than thirty years ago, I remember struggling to rationalize how my knowledge of integration techniques was going to help me design production machinery. I had seen industrial equipment being built in a local machine shop, and I was fascinated with the banks of electrical relays that automated mechanical movement. (This was prior to the time that PLCs came into wide usage.) I wanted to learn how to design such machinery, and so I enrolled in my state’s largest engineering school, taking both mechanical and electrical engineering courses. Although I’m not sorry that I learned calculus along the way, I can safely state that knowing how to integrate by parts was never of benefit in my industrial career. In fact, over the two decades I spent in industry as a design engineer, I never found myself needing to solve an integral equation.

Given that several decades passed before I returned to my alma mater for a PhD, I presumed that the situation had improved. But my conversations with students currently in the middle of their undergraduate studies suggest that things are marginally better, at best. They are learning techniques of solution, but have little engineering insight. Children of my college buddies are now enrolled in various engineering schools around the country. When I talk with them I hear similar stories of being led blindly through math-heavy courses that appear to have little relevance to what they’ve heard at home about real-world engineering duties.

Is it any surprise that students are dropping out of this type of curriculum? Some claim the subject material is simply too hard. However, I think that Robert Talbert correctly identifies the problem:

Students aren’t put off by hard work. They are merely put off by any kind of work that doesn’t appear to be worth the effort.

I’d go further and say that engineering students can’t see the connection between the abstract and physical realms. This confusion is reflected in the following illustration, which has been floating around the internet. (Click on the image to see full size graphic.)

[The upper graphic seems to be from Valve’s Team Fortress 2. If someone knows which textbook the lower derivation is from, I’d be happy to give appropriate credit.]

The sad part is that this graphic is wrong. While research engineers may work in high-level abstractions, a great many engineering activities do not need such advanced mathematical acumen. In fact, many engineering problems are solved with spatial or experiential skills that require little mathematical prowess. So while I see nothing wrong in teaching abstract thinking, I think that engineering studies should advance from the physical realm toward the abstract realm, rather than the other way around. Otherwise, we’re promising to teach students one set of skills (to entice their enrollment), and delivering something else entirely. It strikes me that we’re teaching them how to be graduate students, rather than employable engineers. I suspect that this misalignment has real costs for students, employers, and the nation.

Categories
Engineering Roles

What engineers have in common (part 3)

(Part 1 and part 2 of this series)

In my most recent post, I proposed the following definition (which I’ve slightly revised):

engineer: an individual who designs novel methods, devices, or systems that can be practically implemented to meet specified constraints, or analyzes existing methods, devices, or systems for their capacity to meet such constraints, while making judicious use of scientific models, mathematical analysis, and prior experience.

Engineers working in the physical realm (which I deem to be physineers) use theoretical models that capture how our universe behaves. Strong problem-solving and math skills are used to manipulate those models in a manner that leads to the creation of new physical embodiments.

I note here that working with “real world” objects, in and of itself, does not make one a physineer. A carpenter constructing wooden chairs operates in the physical realm, but we do not typically refer to such an individual as an engineer. If a chair leg were to break, a reasonable carpenter might attempt to replace the failed leg with a larger one, as simple observation of nature lends credence to the notion that bigger is often stronger. However, constructing chairs on a “trial-and-error” basis to find one that does not collapse, but does not waste material, is neither judicious, nor innovative, and is therefore not engineering. I interpret a “judicious” analysis to be a considered compromise among the various parameters influencing the work—including factors of size, weight, environment, material, maintenance, production, and cost. This often requires the development and manipulation of abstract models that permit a multitude of parameters to be evaluated. If such models have already been developed, and acquisition of a solution requires only that a predetermined sequence of computations be faithfully carried out, then the process is again not engineering, as it is not “novel.”

In contrast, a physineer might take the concept of a chair and create an abstract model that can be analyzed and manipulated. This abstraction might take the form of a free-body diagram, or a set of mathematical equations, or computer code. Important parameters could include the type of wood being used and the maximum weight that the chair is to support—as well as the equipment and methods available for fabricating a new leg. Most importantly, a physical engineer keeps in mind the eventual implementation of the modified design. There is little benefit to designing a replacement chair leg that uses an unavailable material (unobtanium), or has to be fabricated using an unreliable method, or incurs an unrealistic cost. By analyzing and modifying the model, a new design (or specific parameters to be incorporated into a design) can be established for a replacement chair leg. In this manner, physineers abstract reality, modify the abstraction, then implement the abstraction.

Key to my thinking is that engineers implement an abstraction. If there is no implementation, or at least a concern about implementation, then the effort is not engineering. However, implementations do not necessarily have to occur in the physical realm. Consider engineers who design database systems, or write system code. Instead of working in the physical realm, they may operate in an informational realm, as illustrated below. The STEM field assignments made in my previous post are still valid; however, the engineering concerns become distinctly different.

I propose that software engineers working in the informational realm be titled infoneers. To the extent they use models of informational behavior to design and implement new “methods, devices, or systems,” then they are as much engineers as physineers. They simply implement their work in a different realm, one that has its own set of entropic concerns. Rather than worrying about rust, or electrical noise, or structural fatigue, infoneers must deal with data integrity, network availability, and transactional states. So infoneers need less knowledge about physics than do physineers, but require a greater awareness of software and data theory. The function of infoneers, however, remains the same as other engineers–to implement an abstraction. If the work doesn’t lead to new code, or a new database, or a new application, then it’s not engineering.

I’ll even make the case, though it pains me to do so, that certain forms of “social engineering” can legitimately be considered engineering. If one uses models of human behavior to design a new means for altering social behavior, then that person seems to fall within my definition of an engineer. (Are marketers such individuals?) I’ll call engineers who work in the social realm to be socianeers. We can even start to match up fields of science with our new engineering descriptors. Physical scientists develop models that can be used by physineers, informational scientists create models used by infoneers, and social scientists advance models used by socianeers. However, each realm has distinct differences, and behavioral properties that are not easily mastered. Thus, crossing realms is difficult. Each has a different set of analytic tools, as well as different idioms to describe pertinent characteristics. However, though difficult, we’ll eventually see engineers starting to share approaches between realms.

Traditional engineering has already blurred the lines between physical realm sub-fields. We now have cross-discipline specialists in areas such as mechatronics, nanorobotics and bioprocessing. As technology advances, we will also begin to see cross-realm specializations. Perhaps an infostructural engineer will be concerned with how traffic and weather data is used to actively modify the structural properties of a bridge. Or a biovirtualization engineer will find ways to use time spent in a virtual environment to improve personal health. So I propose that we accept a wider definition of engineering, one that incorporates the possibility of realms beyond the traditional physical domain.

And what do all engineers have in common? They implement new things in a manner that finds an intelligent compromise between competing constraints in the realm of their expertise.

Of course, that’s just my opinion. What do you think?

Categories
Engineering Roles

What engineers have in common (part 2)

(Part 1 of this series can be found here)

In my last post, I suggested the term physineer be used to describe engineers who deal with the physical realm. These are individuals employed in the traditional engineering fields, such as chemical, electrical, civil, and mechanical engineering. To see how the responsibilities of such engineers are similar to those employed in non-traditional engineering fields, say software or financial engineering, I want to take a closer look at what we consider to be “engineering” activities. In doing so, I’m going to wax philosophical for a bit—but only for a short while, I promise.

We live in a physical world. To survive in this realm we must eat sufficiently well, avoid facing extreme weather conditions without shelter, and protect ourselves from oncoming traffic. Thinking about how a mythical super-hero might catch a bullet in his or her teeth is a fairly harmless mental exercise, but attempting to replicate the feat in real life will lead (most likely) to a life-ending result. We cannot escape many of the consequences that result from our actions (and inactions) in this physical existence.

Despite our inability to escape the material realm, we humans have a natural proclivity for creating mental notions of how and why things work. These abstractions have no material embodiment; they exist only as a result of a particular pattern of brain waves. We can perceive a model to exist in our minds; but we are unable to separate it from our consciousness. I can explain to you the properties of my model, and suggest relevant analogies, but I cannot directly hand you my concept, nor can you hand me yours.

In contrast to our human traits, the physical world has no need for abstractions. (Okay, some of the quantum mechanics stuff is kind of freaky, so feel free to tell me that I’m wrong.) The apple that fell in front of Isaac Newton did not need to compute the gravitational force acting on it; it simply fell. Electrons passing through a wire do not know the wire’s resistance or the voltage drop across the wire; they simply jump from atom to atom. Force and voltage and resistance are human abstractions; models that allow us to comprehend how the world around us behaves. As we learn more about the universe, we update our models. I’m not aware of any evidence that the universe changes to accommodate our conception of how it should properly function.

So I propose a logical separation between the abstract and physical realms (with apologies to the true philosophers among you, who will accurately identify my lack of knowledge about metaphysical concepts such as Idealism and Platonic Realism.) This separation is illustrated in the figure above. The arrows represent our ability to move (mentally, not physically) between the two worlds. As mentioned above, we have a tendency to generate theories about how our universe operates. If our models (abstractions) are sufficiently accurate, then they can be used to “explain” physical phenomena. In some cases, they can potentially be used to predict events and interactions that have not yet been witnessed. Even more powerfully, our abstractions can be used to create new devices or methods that cause the physical world to behave in a manner that is more to our liking. (Think central air conditioning on a hot August afternoon in central Kansas, when the ever-present west wind has inexplicably died down for an entire week, and shimmering black tar bubbles have popped up along every inch of sealed crack in the dull, sun-baked asphalt.)

To further our discussion, I’ve added the names of certain disciplines to the diagram. These are the STEM subjects; science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It seems to me that we can assign one of the STEM fields, in a somewhat meaningful manner, to each side of this figure. Associated with the upward arrow are scientists who observe the real world and try to explain its behavior through the creation of theoretical models. Their model development is guided by the rules of logic and analysis that mathematicians advance while working in the abstract realm, represented here by the upper box. In association with the downward arrow, traditional engineers (physineers) use models to assist in safely modifying physical behaviors, and in creating new physical embodiments. Finally, technologists utilize and operate mankind’s tools and creations while working in the physical realm, which is identified by the lower box.

As with all models, my diagram is an incomplete representation of reality (a notion better stated by Howard Skipper). One obvious flaw is that very few individuals employed in the STEM fields have the luxury (or curse, depending on your perspective) of limiting themselves to a single discipline. In addition to creating new methods and mechanisms, engineers must be able to develop new models, and should be adept in applied math. Scientists must, at times, design their own equipment and develop mathematical tools. Today’s mathematicians may interact with computer hardware or gather physical data, while technologists occasionally have to model physical phenomena or solve obtuse logic problems. But this diagram gives context to my proposed definition of an engineer:

engineer: an individual who designs novel methods, devices, or systems that can be practically implemented to meet specified constraints, or analyzes existing methods, devices, or systems for their capacity to meet such constraints, while making use of models and mathematics.

Physineers clearly fit into my definition of an engineer. But since those engaged in software, financial or social engineering do not design objects that can be physically embodied, can they really be engineers? Up until a few weeks ago, I would have said, “no.” However, note that my definition says nothing about the resulting designs being limited to the material world. In my next post, I will discuss the activities of engineers working in alternate realms.

Categories
Engineering Roles

What do engineers have in common?

While I see many articles concerning new initiatives in STEM education, relatively little is said about the types of duties that engineers perform in the workplace. Any design process has to begin with certain constraints on the finished product, and it seems to me that an informed choice of curriculum and educational methods should begin with an understanding of the skills needed by newly graduated engineers. We live in a rapidly changing world, but are relying on an educational system that is rather dated. Simply doing more of what we’ve always done seems rather inefficient. It is also strikes me as unfair to students to make them endure an education process that is misaligned with their career interests. So I am curious if we can determine the overarching commonalities that exist in the career category we call “engineering.”

Operators of railroad trains, broadcasting equipment, boilers, and aircraft systems have long been given the title of  “engineer.” However, these duties are different from the math-intensive skills that are taught in most engineering classes. Further, just about any activity that involves planning or scheming is now described as “engineering.” I cringe each time I come across the term “social engineer” being used to describe someone who manipulates the emotions and trust of others. Alas, my discomfort with the nomenclature does little to remove it from the common vernacular. So let me be more specific in describing a particular set of engineering functions.  I’m going to identify those who graduate from traditional engineering programs (mechanical, electrical, chemical, nuclear, civil, etc.) as “physical” engineers, or physineers. Central to their skill set is a knowledge of how the physical world behaves.

A story that received a lot of attention at the beginning of last month was Facebook’s plan to open an engineering office in New York City. I have previously expressed some concern over software professionals being called “engineers.” As recently as last week, I was prepared to write a post to argue that the “engineer” moniker has been co-opted to the point of becoming meaningless. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the skills of these software experts, but rather that I believe they solve a different type of problem than do physineers. However, after giving it some thought, I’m of a less dogmatic mindset. Efforts of software engineers, financial engineers, and social engineers do, in fact, share some commonalities with those who work in traditional engineering fields. We just need better naming conventions to describe the duties that each group of engineers perform for society.

The whole naming issue is important because of the disconnect that exists between the skill sets that employers are asking for, that universities are providing, and that students are expecting to learn. A recent article on the Forbe’s website heralded the strong demand for engineering talent, but neglected to point out that most of the job openings are for software engineers. Think that becoming a computer hardware engineer is a closely related safe bet? Sorry, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that software engineering employment will grow at a mean rate of 2.1% per year, the forecast is that jobs for computer hardware engineers will grow at only one-fifth that rate. Additionally, the forecast is for 1.2 million software engineers in 2018, but only seventy-seven thousand computer hardware engineers. Employment opportunities will not be evenly distributed across the engineering terrain. We need to be far more specific in the skill sets we ask young engineers to attain. So I want to look more closely at what engineers (of all stripes) actually do, and how we might better distinguish between their various responsibilities and activities. I’ll proceed with this discussion in my next post.

Categories
Engineering Roles

Building Sandcastles

As a life-long Midwesterner, I haven’t spent a lot of time on the beach. However, I managed to build enough sandcastles during my youth to know that hours of effort can quickly disappear underneath the waves of a rising tide. No matter how beautiful the structure, how perfect its lines and curves, it stands no chance against a powerful sea that seeks to level everything it can touch. If the sandcastle is to be admired for more than a few hours, it has to be rebuilt. Time and time again, one must construct the sculpture, fully aware that it will erode as high tide sweeps in. Of course, the joy of construction disappears after a few days. But the destructive nature of the tides is unrelenting, so one must build the sandcastle once more.

Although I’ve long since forgotten where I picked up this sandcastle metaphor, I often use it when thinking about the life cycle of engineering projects. It is deceptively easy to believe that the job is finished once a device, or system, or methodology has been designed. However, as soon as that design is released into the real world, it will begin to erode. Surfaces idealized as perfectly smooth by the designer acquire minute ripples during the machining process. Electronic signals pick up noise, hydraulic pumps leak, bearings seize, and chemical solutions degrade. As a result, maintenance is a large portion of the engineering workload. Many engineers spend their careers doing nothing but keeping industrial processes operating smoothly. And anyone responsible for maintaining a house built more than twenty-five years ago knows that there is a significant cost, both in time and currency, associated with keeping a once-pristine structure in proper working order.

Although nature can do significant damage to an engineered system, the most severe problems are often people-related. Managers forget the caveats placed on equipment specifications, and begin demanding unrealistic production rates. Operators forget rules about proper usage, and begin to utilize machinery in applications for which it was not intended. Engineers fail to ask enough questions when integrating equipment into larger systems. And so the erosion accelerates. Devices, systems, and methodologies, once so lovingly designed to serve a particular purpose, begin to break down as they are misused, misapplied, or misappropriated.

System failure is not always a bad thing, as it may lead to knowledge of how the scheme might be improved. But it is usually a unwanted outcome, and keeping a system running smoothly requires diligent observation. A supervision style known as Management By Wandering Around involves checking in with employees, in a casual and unstructured manner, and asking questions about how things are going—so as to discover how processes and procedures might be improved. This methodology emphasizes identification of unexpected complications, as it focuses on newly-arisen issues, and is not intended as a replacement for standard performance reports. In a similar manner, frequent inspections are required to keep engineered systems operating on a reliable basis.

Although failures can be reduced via analysis during the conceptual and design phases, the most difficult problems are usually unanticipated. Thus, one can never assume that a system is “done.” I regard as cruel any engineer who tosses a design “over the wall” and walks away without regard for others who must subsequently maintain system functionality. All physical processes have to be observed, analyzed, maintained, and tweaked to offset the unrelenting tendency of nature to maximize randomness. Steel will rust, capacitors will short circuit, and out-of-spec materials will find their way into the process.

Likewise, interpersonal understandings may have to be reconstructed on a regular basis. Managers may need to be reminded as to their original agreements about specified performance. (Keeping a contemporaneous notebook is quite useful in this regard.) Operators may require a bit of nudging to return to proper operating procedures—although this should be done with an open mind, as they may be ready and able to show why the procedures should be revised. Colleagues may benefit from a better understanding of how a prior-generation system was intended to operate. But none of this can happen if an engineer holes up in a cubicle, and refuses to interact with others. There has to be a willingness to walk the beach, just to see how the sandcastle is fairing.

When engineering students are asked to carry out design projects in a period of a few weeks, just getting their design to function properly is a sufficient challenge. However, during semester-long activities, such as a senior design project, young engineers need to be made aware of the multitude of forces that may cause their designs to decay. Where possible, designs should account for the eventualities of repair, maintenance, and disposal. These issues are certainly of less immediate importance when one is thrashing about, trying to get a new design to simply work. However, as a design is refined and improved, the life cycle of the system deserves serious consideration.

Engineering graduates should also understand that, during the course of their careers, they will likely run into financially-focused managers who will tell them to put off maintenance, or goal-driven managers who may ask them to run systems outside of specification. There are sometimes quite legitimate reasons for doing such things, and the political clout to countermand such decisions is frequently beyond the engineer’s reach. But they should attempt, to the best of their abilities, to reconstruct the agreements and understandings that constrained the original design work. In a perfect world, this should not have to be done. But it usually falls to an engineer to deal with the physical consequences that result from such managerial decisions. So engineers should learn early on that, sooner or later, someone will have to go out and rebuild the sandcastle.

Categories
Engineering Roles

Engineering Role Research

In scanning the internet for information on engineering roles, I stumbled across an the web page of James Trevelyan, a professor at the University of Western Australia. He is leading research into Engineering Learning and Practice. An interesting eleven-minute introduction from 2008 can be viewed online. It appears that Dr. Trevelyan is of the opinion that universities teach relatively few of the skills required in engineering practice.

A recorded web conference conducted in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin indicates that studies of engineering practice here in the United States are also being conducted. A quick sampling of this conference provided several insights, one of which is that incoming engineering students are unaware of their future duties; nobody wants to think that they will be responsible for production or maintenance—they mostly anticipate being designers and researchers. There is a lot of information is available on Prof. Trevelyan’s site; it will take me a while to try and digest it all. Better too much data than too little!

Categories
Engineering Revision

Sorting Out the Lines of Thought

It is my hope that, by making frequent blog entries, I will slowly sort out the tangle of thoughts that go through my head each day. These ideas and notions are often related to the engineering profession or engineering curriculum—and they all seem tangentially related to one another in some way as they pass through my consciousness. Without stopping to write them down, however, all I retain is an emotional agitation that comes from knowing that things are changing, but not being sure what to do about it. It is somewhat akin, I must confess, to the way that I felt about my stock investments throughout most of last spring.

So, as a first pass, I see these issues as needing resolution to put my tiny brain at ease:

Role: Are engineers to continue as problem solvers, or should they (could they?) become advisers to society? In a Talk of the Nation interview on NPR, former marine biologist Randy Olson talks about why scientists need to involved in presenting their findings to the general public, and how they might do so effectively. It seems to me that as the world becomes more complex, we need engineers to speak up about the inevitable compromises that are part of any sufficiently robust system. The concept of relying on facts, rather than anecdotes, is only now starting to get due attention in management circles. Courtesy of Stanford professors Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer, the notion of evidence-based management reached the readers of the Harvard Business Review in 2006. If not evidence, on just what have managers been basing their decisions up to now? Could engineers really do any better, or are they so lacking in charisma and social skills that they could barely stay afloat in the choppy waters of corporate politics?

Skills: Are the skills that students learn in college in any way related to the skills they need to be productive in society? It seems to me that engineering curriculum is too often subject to the tyranny of technique. Yes, students can calculate the maximum stress in a beam, but do they know what to do with the number they generate? They may be able to produce a Bode plot for a feedback system, but can they use that information to reduce system error? It is undoubtedly easier to teach and grade technique, but is this ultimately a disservice to students, and to society? Further, a majority of the engineers that I graduated with become project engineers, rather than designers or researchers. Would their classroom time not have been better spent learning more about project management, and less about the intricacies of partial differential equations? This is not to say that we could ever abandon mathematical rigor in the engineering sciences. However, with college costs climbing without bound, perhaps a more judicial use of students’ time and money is prudent; not every engineering student want to pursue an academic career. For those who want to proceed to grad school, the current arrangement may be fine. However, are the remaining students receiving an education that will allow them to acheive rapid proficiency throughout their working careers?

Education: Based on the roles and skills needed by engineers, it is possible to start addressing the education of engineering students. This topic is vast, and I might start by breaking it down into four subheadings:

  • Topics: What skills should we be teaching? More software programming? More interpersonal skills? More hardcore engineering?
  • Methods: By what method should we present these topics? Screencasts? Online lectures? One-on-one tutoring?
  • Style: How might the material be best presented to allow students to quickly comprehend key concepts?
  • Structure: What is the structure by which this education is best delivered? Are universities still the right venue for delivering an engineering education? Will new organizations, either ad-hoc or private enterprise, sprout up to deliver an education at a lower cost, and in less time?

I’ll try to work through these issues in future posts. If blogging fails to help me sort out these thoughts, then perhaps the “Preparing Future Faculty” program I enrolled in today will get me moving down the right path. By completing the course I am supposed to be able to:

  • Explore and reflect on my assumptions about academic roles, positions, practices, missions, and institutions.
  • Construct an institutional profile and relate my career goals and faculty skill sets with institutional missions and departmental goals.
  • Construct a career strategic plan for enhancing and maintaining faculty skill sets and competencies.
  • Develop a portfolio including curriculum vita, cover letter, research statement, and teaching philosophy.

Sounds like a good start to me!

Categories
Engineering Revision

Welcome to Engineering Revision

More than a decade ago I started a blog titled ZopeNewbies, utilizing (then hard-to-come-by) web space kindly donated by blogging pioneer Dave Winer. It was my intention at the time to assist those interested in the Zope web framework as I investigated the software myself. Although I wrote a few well-received tutorials along the way, I quickly discovered that the hours spent summarizing Zope news devoured any and all time I had available for learning the software. And after almost two years of blogging, I decided the two to three hours I was spending on the ZopeNewbies site each morning could be put to better use. So I placed the site in the capable hands of Luke Tymowski, and moved on to other things. Since then I’ve had a great appreciation for bloggers who can generate insightful material on a regular basis — but I’ve had no desire to return to blogging myself. Until now.

Although I don’t consider myself a hardcore geek, I do love technology. I am fascinated by how things work, and I enjoy thinking about how devices and processes might better function. To that end, I’ve gone just about as far as I can go in trying to train myself to be an effective engineer. At the age of (almost) fifty, I am finishing up a mechanical engineering doctorate at Purdue University. A licensed professional engineer since 1986, I’ve worked for small machine shops, medium-sized companies, and large mega-corporations. And for the past fifteen years I’ve run my own consulting business. Throughout my career, I’ve been surprised by the apparent disconnect between what is taught in engineering classes, and what passes for engineering in industry. While I’ve seen encouraging steps taken to close that gap, I don’t believe that change is coming fast enough. So this blog is going to talk about how the responsibilities, skills, and training of engineers will necessarily change as we plunge deeper into the twenty-first century.

As I hope to point out in future posts, the role of engineers must evolve as technology marches forward at an ever increasing rate. It is unlikely that a larger percentage of the population will ever want to study engineering, but modern technology is rapidly allowing more and more people to leverage the power of applied science. As both society and the infrastructure upon which it relies become more complex, engineers must transform from isolated problem-solvers to socially adept guides who can direct the technical endeavors of others. While still in my twenties, I spent a couple of years teaching engineering technology classes; I know that it can be challenging to motivate students to absorb difficult mathematical concepts. Trying to interest them in the psychology of group dynamics may be near impossible. But the need for a new style of engineer has never been greater, and the tools available for revolutionizing engineering instruction have never been more readily available.

So welcome to Engineering Revision. If you have an opinion on this topic, please feel free to leave a comment.