Engineering "boot camp" at universities should be a thing of the past 7

[josephv]

Last fall, I went to my 10 year university graduation reunion. Looking back, I am glad that I chose engineering as a career. I enjoy what I do for a living.

And although there were some aspects of my engineering education that I enjoyed at university, I have to admit that overall I was disappointed.

Sometimes, we need some distance to make an assessment. Now, I can look back at my engineering education and I can honestly say that it was the “boot camp” program in my university that I disliked.

“Boot camp” is le mot just, when you consider that approximately half of the students either failed or dropped out on the first year. To make matters worse, I sensed that many of the members of the academic staff were actually proud of this fact. Many students feel that the main goal of the university is to “weed out” students, instead of providing them with an education.

What did this outdated mentality accomplish, except turn young students away from our noble profession?

Unfortunately, too many universities and colleges still have “boot camp” programs in place. What I would like to see is university engineering programs that students can enjoy. Much can be done to make engineering school more appealing. For example, interesting design projects can be incorporated into courses.

Certainly, the programs should be challenging, but the outdated “weeding out” process must be a thing of the past. Our new generations will not buy into the old cliché that one must “pay your dues”.

An interesting fact that I learned at the reunion, was that many of the top students that had enjoyed this “boot camp” program, were selling mutual funds. And many of the students who truly enjoyed “the existential pleasures of engineering” (to quote from Samuel Florman), were working as engineers, designing, manufacturing and building things.

In the next five years we must say good bye to the old “boot camp” engineering school program, and put it in the dust bin where it belongs, and demand a better engineering education for future generations.

 

[rhodie]

My comment was directed at the idea that there are barriers to women and minorities becoming engineers. I see no barriers.

* The few women in my engineering program went to school for free largely due to an overabundance of scholarships available to women in engineering careers.
The overabundance is caused by not enough women taking advantage of them.
(i.e. Most women could care less about engineering. It's not a stereotypically "feminine" position."

* The "minorities" I went to school with only considered themselves "minorities" on scholarship applications. I cannot tell you that they were treated any different or given detremental consideration over "majority" colored students. (That is the way it should be, BTW.) The "minorities" were the first to be hired after graduation, however. Everyone has a strong incentive to be "affirmative action" compliant. In this sense, the "minorities" actually have the advantage.

I thought we got over this archaic view 20 years ago (that women just don't want to be engineers).

I think that the archaic view is the one that says "to think that women don't want to be engineers is archaic." You go into a sixth grade, eighth grade, or senior class and ask for girl's hands on "Who wants to be an engineer when they grow up?" and you'll see your the root cause of the "problem".

 

[leanne]

There are only a small percentage of wome I graduated with still in engineering. Most used engineering school as the foundation for medical school or as a stepping stone to another career path.

 

[Handsome7]

As a recent graduate I can appreciate the original post about the problems of a boot camp style of engineering education and the weeding out process. I started out as a physics major and then switched to engineering. I had trouble with senior level physics courses because they required incredible amounts of study time and I was always wondering about the applications of the things we were learning. When asking a professor (who was always a mathematician) about applications, I always got roundabout answers or percieved as a wise guy. I spent more time solving problems than actually learning what I was doing and what I was doing it for. Needless to say, I saw that I didn't want to become a physicist.
When I switched to engineering, I could ask questions about applications and get no nonsense straight forward real world answers. I found this to be very encouraging and motivating. I also tended to learn more when I had research projects where I actually had to design and build somnething. Universities should consider letting engineering teachers teach the math and physics courses to engineering students.
I had a tough time with some of my courses but I stuck it out and finished. There were some students I thought would be pretty good engineers but they couldn't put the time into it because they had to maintain full time jobs. I think that's a travesty. I worked also and I could sympathize. In cases like this the weeding out is not good because there are many students who would do well under different circumstances. They were not academically or intellectually deficient.
I also feel that the overall university curriculum is geared more toward preparing the student to be a researcher.

 

[Dryver]

As an undergrad I have seen the current "boot camp" at my univeristy, and at least for Aerospace it has seemed a bit backwards. While the first year and a half was relatively easy, we were not given too much of a taste of Aerospace or engineering. After that the classes became progressively harder, with much more Aerospace involved. The hardest would have been our Aerodynamics II class where the professor decided to add graduate level work to the class because he believed not enough graduate students took the class. The problem with this system is that students have not recieved a broad enough view of Aerospace engineering until the point where it is very tough to change majors, even to another engineering major, and still graduate in 4 years. I agree that there should be a weeding out process, but I think it should be based on engineering classes early in ones undergraduate career, rather then the core calculus and physics classes. Some students drop out of engineering not because they cannot handle the load, but because early on they are not given a taste of the end result.
J.G

 

[Binary]

Four years???

At my alma mater fewer than 20% of the engineers graduated in four years even though we had to declare on matriculation and changing majors was nearly impossible because it was so impacted.

Even if you could handle 17-19 units per quarter, every quarter, there was no way you'd get all your classes to stay on schedule. The 4-yr grads usually had at least 2 summers in there.

 

[Dryver]

For our school it is quite possible to graduate in four years, provided you are willing to work at it, take the full load, and pass all of your classes. We have a program that we were given our freshman year detailing which classes needed to be taken each semester, and as long as you stay on this track four years is very achievable. Now if you have to retake a class, take a semester internship, or are going after a double major there will be problems graduating in four unless you want to take over twenty credits a semester. This hurts most people when they miss a pre-requisit class that is only offered once a year, essentially setting students back nearly an entire year. Very few of my classmates have taken many summer classes as very few aerospace classes are offered in the summer.

J.G

 

[CRG]

Hello,

After reading many of the responses above, I came to the conclusion that many underachievers are trying to defend their position in life by blaming the system. Just because they were spoon fed at home does not mean that they should expect this in life. Remember, when the going gets tough, (the weak quit) the tough get going. I believe that the purpose of engineering school is to develop basic skills to enable one to research and solve problems. No coddling should be allowed in school. It reduces the quality of education to the lowest common denominator. When I went to school, I was interested in getting the most education for the dollar invested.

CRG

 

[rhodie]

CRB

No one is whining. You obviously didn't read as many responses as you say you did.

Your statement "When I went to school, I was interested in getting the most education for the dollar invested." is exactly the point these people are trying to make. Why be uncessarily burdened with "busy work" simply for the purpose of washing out lesser students? Instead, why not cover the other 95% of engineering that doesn't normally make it into the classroom? The "lesser students" will wash out of their own accord because of lack of interest and boredom; if not in college, then after they work for a couple of years. How many miserable engineers (that hate doing their work) do you know? I'd say not many.

The whole tone of your reply is condescending, as if you have something some other people here don't have. I'd consider that character trait justification for some serious self-evaluation, and remember: There is always someone smarter, better looking, and faster than you.

 

[TheTick]

Many engineers say they believe they deserve the same status and respect as MD's. These are the same engineers who complain about "weeding out". If the MD's could read this!

Good and evil: wrap them up and disguise it as people.

 

[brad]

rhodie,
Your statement "why be unnecessarily burdened with busy work . . ." implies that there is coursework which only exists for the point of frustrating us. I ask this question in all sincerity--what courses in your experience qualified as this "busy work"? I have thought through all of my coursework in undergrad, and there is not a single engineering nor math class which I can list as such. Some people could argue that the humanities electives would qualify, but these are clearly outside the scope of what this thread is discussing.

All of my math requirements were necessary to appreciate engineering theories which were later presented. All of my lower-level engineering courses were likewise necessary to appreciate subsequent engineering courses. Were many of these lower-level classes hard? Yes. But they weren't hard for the sake of nailing people, they were hard for the sake of PREPARING us.

Maybe others (including yourself) had a different experience, or maybe a similar experience but have not had the opportunity to use them. I am sincerely curious--what particular science/math/engineering (required) courses did you have that you view as being of little use?

Brad

 

[QCE]

Brad

Oh I remeber now how badly I needed to study unique factorization and congruences, the ring of integers modulo n and its units, Fermat's little theorem, Wilson's theorem, Chinese remainder theorem, finite fields, quadratic reciprocity, and the Fermat theorem on primes congruent to one modulo four, etc.

I think most people will agree that this was a hoop to jump through!

Having said that, I have no problem with that. However I made it through the hoop so I'm a little biased.

QCE

 

[TheTick]

Maybe I'm a masochist. I enjoyed calculus. Even though I don't remember much today due to lack of daily application, calculus and differential equations classes gave me an appreciation for what is happening behind the scenes of the engineering programs I rely on. This is especially important in FEA. It has also been important in troubleshooting parasolid kernel-related CAD problems. What about splines? Ever try to understand them without a calculus refresher?

Good and evil: wrap them up and disguise it as people.

 

[CRG]

The only busy work that I was compelled to do in college was in the Liberal Arts Department, and not in the Engineering School. The scope of work in engineering is so varied that it is not possible to teach engineers specific knowledge required for a given job. If this is what you want, you should have gone to a trade/tech school to get hands on experience for a job. I stand by my previous statement that it is the Engineering School’s job to teach students how to research and solve problems. When an engineering student graduates and finds employment, they should have the skills required to research their needs at work and find the tools necessary to complete the tasks requested by their supervisors. Don’t expect to be spoon fed all of the details required for the workplace. I found all of my Math, Science, and Engineering classes relevant to developing the skills required to research and solve problems. When studying for the PE exam, I reviewed my college course notes and found greater appreciation for what the Engineering School taught me. I had no need to review my notes from the Liberal Arts Classes.

Rhodie, I do have something that a few people who have commented in this thread don’t have: Experience, Success, and Confidence. This is not to imply that you do not have these qualities. Perhaps when you recommend serious self-evaluation for someone else, you need to look at yourself first.

 

[jpankask]

I am new to this forum and have enjoyed reading the various threads. This thread caught my attention because although I don't think my school had a planned out "weeding out" process, there was in fact a lot of weeding out during the first two years of undergraduate studies. I'm reminded of the first night of calculus I homework where we were assigned 60-some problems due the next day at recitation. It could not have been completed by anybody and we lost about a third of the class after that. The cycle was repeated again in calculus II. A similar experience was had our second year with physics I and II. Most of us who made it through that second year stuck it out the final 2-3 years. I can tell you that I am very grateful that my classmates in my upper-level engineering classes where the ones who I knew would stick it out because they were part of my study groups. I knew that they were serious about earning their degree and they weren't going to drop out at the first sign of hard times.

I found out soon after graduation that most of what I had learned the past 5 years wasn't going to help me much in the "real world" and I've since come to the conclusion that the engineering degree just tells people that you have the problem-solving skills and the fortitude to find a solution. I will admit that at the time, I though that professor who assigned 60 calculus problems in one night was sent from satan and that he had to be crazy but as I can sit back now and look at the whole picture of the last 10 years, I am very satisfied with my university experience and some of my hardest professors are actually my favorites because I learned the most from them (except the one or two who were hard just to be hard).

Whether intentional or not, there will always be some degree of weeding out no matter how easy the professor makes it. I do think it's good practice to see just which students are there to seriously buckle down and earn a degree or which are there because they have nothing better to do.

 

[rhodie]

bradh

"I ask this question in all sincerity--what courses in your experience qualified as this "busy work"?"

1. My engineering college was ABET accredited, so my expeirence cannot be that different from most.

2. I'm of the opinion that an engineer cannot take enough math.

That said, I see no benefit of taking classes like Fortran, which took the form of one of those "washout" classes in my degree pattern. The prof. endlessly burdened us and tested us on the finer details of Fortran, a language long dead. Why not spend 16 weeks on a sampling of "modern" languages, teaching analytical thought (the important part!) for the entire time rather than a whole semester of obsolete garbage from the 70's? Fortran wasn't really hard, just pointless!

Another example: General Chemistry 2. Why!? Gen. Chem 1 I can appreciate and use, but anything further is too specific to be generally referenced by engineers. It was nothing but a prelude to Organic Chem, which is fine if you are an environmental/chemical major, but we were ME's and still required to take it. This again was a trouble spot for many of my classmates. (lack of interest?)

I left the ME program at my school in my fifth semester to pursue an MET degree. Most everyone questioned my judgement (i.e. "Can't you handle the hard stuff?&quot The truth of the matter is of course I could have, but I was wasting too much time in the ME program. (by taking endless classes in heat theory and fluid dynamics characteristics rather than learning reasonable engineering skills.) No freshly graduated ME I know knows anything more about CAD, CNC, PLC, Machine Shop theory, or Engineering cost analysis than any 2nd year MET student I know.

No ME program I am aware of teaches semester length classes on Quality Control, Operations Management, Material Handling / Facility Layout, ISO/QS requirements, or Logistics. Yet I see these skillsets listed in job descriptions FAR more than I see "Knowledge of micro-vibrations in FCC lattices" or "Elasticty Modeling for Thermoset Plastics". Granted, I completely understand the importance of such knowledge, but not the need to exhaust the understanding of such topics in a general engineering curriculum.

Therefore, understand that I do not hold a typical engineering degree, and that fact may disqualify my opinion on this subject, but I do believe I hold a "typical" type of engineering job, and I use a majority of the skills I learned in college rather than only a fraction. More than one ME I have worked with has expressed regret in not making the same choice I did.

I say the change that needs to be made is not eliminate the "weed-out" courses, but to become much more efficent and affectual with the coursework required. Maybe offer more distinct engineering degrees: Branch Mechanical Engineering into many specific degrees, i.e. Manufacturing, Product, Structural, Automotive, etc... Above all else, don't force me to waste 16 weeks and several hundred dollars on a class I won't make a dime off of in "the real world".

 

[TheTick]

from rhodie: ...(by taking endless classes in heat theory and fluid dynamics characteristics rather than learning reasonable engineering skills.)

There is a whole world of engineering beyond the sclerotic realm of mechanical design that requires intimate knowledge of these subjects.

Good and evil: wrap them up and disguise it as people.

 

[rhodie]

TheTick:

1. Make fundamental things first in engineering education. Expose students to the concepts, elaborate where necessary, but don't make doctors out of undergrads, simply because the prof. wrote his doctoral thesis on the subject (and is comfortable with teaching it.)

2. I had to look up sclerotic.

3. I agree with the intent of what you are saying, but the problem is that engineers simply cannot be in college for 15 years. Make education simpler (not necessarily easier), and create more specialized majors. (This would require colleges to pick and choose specific programs, and operate on a truely not-for-profit basis, but that is another discussion!) Be more efficient, concentrate on clarity of the instruction, not "policing the ranks". Self-teaching yourself calculus because your professor had 400 other students besides you and left you with no other option doesn't make you a better engineer, it just means you got ripped off of your tuition money. (It is, after all, called "tuition" and not "intuition".) Don't neglect broad areas of basic instruction to focus on specific areas of advanced instruction for the sake of academic "haute monde".

 

[TheTick]

Going for a MET degree in a narrow field is a great path if you're zeroed in on what you want, especially if it's mech design or CNC programming. It's not OK for many others. Most students going into engineering do not know enough about engineering to know what they are getting into. Most do not know enough about the various subdisciplines (thermo, fluids, mechanical design) to be making that career choice.

I was an enlisted navy "nuke" going for a commission on a NROTC scholarship. I had seen most of the fluids and thermo before, which helped a lot. I needed more where I was going to end up (commissioned officer on nuclear submarine. For me, it was all very relevant.

Good and evil: wrap them up and disguise it as people.

 

[Binary]

{u}Rhodie[/u] - The problem with the "busy work" thought is that you never know where the ME (or CE or IE or EE...) grad is going to end up and what knowledge will be beneficial to them.

Chem 2 - I would have agreed with you early in my career. Then, a failed run at getting into med school left me with a very strong chemistry background (quant, O chem, biochem, P chem, etc). That background got me two job offers, both with companies that were basically hardware folks but saw value in a hardware guy with a chem background. I took one of those positions and was ultimately given a task which didn't neatly fit into any category and one in which I had cause to regularly converse with chemists. The project was a raging success, mostly because I had enough chemistry to talk with the chemists but was still a mechanical engineer doing what was basically mechanical design.

You just never know what knowledge might prove valuable.

My dad always told me, "never turn down the chance to learn something new." I'm a huge believer in that.

WRT Fortran, it's as good as any other language for learning the fundamentals of programming without getting hung up in Windows objects. The only other that I might choose for a CSC 101 type class would be Pascal. I certainly would stay away from the various flavors of C and VB for a 1st class in programming. Just me, though.

 

[brad]

Rhodie,
Thanks for answering my post in the manner which the question was asked (as opposed to taking it personally). FWIW, my second chemistry course WAS organic chem, so I'll grant you that one.

I never appreciated that there is a point to FORTRAN in particular until I had to write my own programs to insert into current commercial codes--some of today's commercial codes still utilize FORTRAN for user-extensibility reasons. I wish I hadn't forgotten as much as I had. Your particular gripes on FORTRAN appear to have more to do with a sadistic professor, and less to do with the intent of the course (which is to teach programming concepts to engineering students).

Beyond these two classes, it seems that many of your cited frustrations were with upper-level ME curriculum. It is noteworthy that I am in the field of structural analysis, yet the best work of my career (which received a very prestigious technology award) was done with knowledge in fluid mechanics and flow theory--coursework which until that time (I thought) had been wasted on me. Did I remember the exact details? No. But I had the basis and quickly refreshed myself. This is Tick's point--a BSME (and I would suspect in general any engineering BS) is intended to establish foundational capability for engineering growth. I don't begrudge you your MET, but it is a different beast in this respect.

As far specialization goes, my college (and others of which I am familiar) had a focused set of upper-level coursework ("cognates" or "specializations&quot which amounted to 5 courses worth of electives which were intended to deepen the knowledge of the student in a particular field. Examples within ME were Automotive, Plastics Engineering, and Machine Design. One could design their own, so long as they met criteria of a certain amount of high-level undergrad courses, and they had a coherent theme. I think this answers what you are suggesting as desired at the Jr/Sr levels.
Brad